Assignment 04 – Samuel Moyn piece
Samuel Moyn’s fascinating first chapter from his book, The Last Utopia, traces the emergence of the modern notion and politics of human rights. What he uncovers is that the route to this conception – still, a relatively abstract one – was by no means linear and is fraught with more than a few contradictions to untangle. The very question of the differences between today’s “human rights” and yesterday’s “rights of man” gets at the heart of these contradictions.
Moyn helps readers to place this ideological development (the “rights of man,” as we have discussed, was the precursor to “human rights”) in their context. It was an era of democratic revolution which, by definition, meant the replacement of monarchical systems or autocratic rule in both the US and in France. From these revolutionary demands for the rights of man – again, it is a revolutionary notion that mere mortals, not just the nobility, should have anything afforded to them – emerged the modern state, a codified system of laws and institutions governed by elected and appointed officials. Moyn shows that the notion of “the rights of man” was intimately connected to and tied up with the emergence of the state. It was the threat of collective, or democratic, action (27) that could be used as leverage to ensure that rights were respected. The rights of man, then, were more about collective rights of “peoples” seen previously as subjects of a brutal autocracy that acted with complete and utter impunity. It’s rule was supreme and unmitigated.
By contrast, today’s “human rights” are tied to deeply embedded notions of individual rights – as set up against state power. While, in some ways, “individual rights” seem almost entirely unobjectionable, Moyn shows that the most persistent individual right that has been propagated through the years is that of “property rights.” Further, he includes revolutionary criticism of human rights as a farce to uphold the powers of the capitalist state and the propertied class. While Moyn speaks only briefly of Marx, it is interesting – and important – how he shows the very profound connection between the notion of collective rights (emerging from the rights of man) and that of workers rights. Marx saw those things in opposition to individual rights, though, as Moyn explains, he was not a proponent of the state either.
While the “rights of man” laid the ground work in important ways for the emergence of today’s modern notion of “human rights,” the path has gone largely in the opposite direction from where it initially seemed to be leading – collective struggle against a powerful minority vs. individual rights set up against state institutions (though, as Marx argued, they help to hold up the very institutions that they seem to be set against). While Moyn doesn’t say it explicitly, at least not in the first chapter, human rights may be less about empowering the powerless than one might think.
