5 Outline

Due Sunday, February 26th, by midnight. Word count: 400 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. If you paraphrase, make sure to include the proper citation.

In chapter one of Samuel Moyn’s work, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he begins to make his argument that “the rights of man,” though a powerful influence on the organization of politics during the nineteenth century, is different from the concept of “human rights” as described in the 1940s and as the concept continues to be used today. In your own words, explain how you think Moyn differentiates these terms: “the rights of man” and “human rights.”

My apologies if you read an earlier version of this response. I accidentally posted before I was finished writing.

During week 2, we focused on the documents and declarations that Lynn Hunt views as precursors to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations in 1948. Hunt notes how discussions about “the rights of man” reorganized the relationship of French and American subjectivity to the sovereign, paving the way for discourses that emphasize rights as universal. Carole Pateman’s work takes a different view on “rights,” stressing how in social contract theory “sex right” is joined to such discourse. Hunt suggests that by defining natural rights in terms that stressed a right to property, theorists like John Locke engineered rights in terms that did not challenge slavery. This point becomes much more nuanced in Pateman’s work, I would argue. For Pateman, the conceptualization and arrangement of property and subjectivity (for white men of a certain standing) was joined to the bodies of women who were brought into civil society through the marriage contract.

As we discussed in class last Tuesday, one way of reading Pateman’s work and the distinction between public and private life that she stresses follows contract theorists like Locke and Rousseau who make women more a part of the environment that directors of it. In this way, the subjugation of women and their bodies are connected to the individuality that is being defined for men only. As Allison noted in her presentation, this understanding of women, as something less than an individual capable of making a contract, raises questions about the way equality is being instrumentalized through subjugation. We spent a good portion of class discussing whether and how the inequality that Pateman attributes to contract theory continues to define marriage today. I think Pateman is suggesting we consider as well how the arrangement and conceptualization of sexual difference becomes a way of framing a story about freedom and subjection (see p. 6, for example).

Building on this point, we should consider how the conceptualization and organization of the body (and differences between bodies) are connected to the stories we tell about life and its possibilities. This idea bears some kinship to the argument Wendy Brown makes in the essay we are reading for this week, on “Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism.” If you have trouble following Brown’s essay, I encourage you to read page 460. There is a good synopsis of her argument at the top of this page where she ask us to consider how projects that aim to reduce or limit suffering are already joined to certain ways of imagining subjects and their potential. This point is repeated throughout Brown’s essay as she guides us through a substantive rethinking of Michael Ignatieff’s argument that human rights campaigns can be an apolitical attempt to reduce human suffering.

Due Sunday, February 19th, by midnight. Word count: 400 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. If you paraphrase, make sure to include the proper citation.

In Wendy Brown’s essay, “‘The Most We Can Hope For…’ Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” she argues that human rights activism is more than it claims to be. In your own words, describe some of the evidence Brown provides to support her claim that human rights activism cannot be reduced to “a pure defense of the innocent and powerless” (2004:453). Do you agree with Brown? Why or why not?

I’ve just finished reading through your responses to the chapters we read from Lynn Hunt’s work, Inventing Human Rights (2007). Before commenting on the substance of your posts, I want to make a few comments about the more formal aspects of your writing.

Please make sure to proofread before you publish. I don’t deduct points for spelling and grammar so long as a post is legible. However, if there are numerous spelling and / or grammatical errors, you will receive partial credit. Sometimes posts appear in wingdings. This happens when students use a web-based platform (like google docs) to compose their post and accidentally copy html coding when transferring the content to WordPress. To prevent this from happening, I recommend writing and editing in Microsoft Word. Or, you can review your post in WordPress using the text editor (above) and remove any html coding that appears (HTML coding is everything that appears in brackets <> ). Be sure everything is written in your own words, and any paraphrased text includes a citation. Finally, the only category assigned to your post is the assignment for that week. For example, this week you should have tagged your post with the category on the right: “assignment 01.”

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As many of you noted in your responses this week, Lynn Hunt (2007) is interested in examining the political, as well as what she refers to as the social and cultural practices, that accompanied the emergence of discourses on human rights. What is emerging, she argues, is nothing short of a new way of understanding human relations. Returning to works by Jefferson, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke and others, Hunt notes the precursors to human rights: discourses on “natural rights” and “the rights of man.” But related to these discourses, she underlines an increasing sense of autonomy and empathy that was developing in Western Europe and North America during this period. Pointing to the work of J. B. Schneedwind, she considers how moral autonomy is treated during this time as a capacity developing in the lives of those capable of participating in the new forms of government available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As we discussed at length in our discussion last night, who was viewed as “capable” and on what terms is a question that, for Hunt, is secondary to the project of considering what prompted this shift towards expressing the universal qualities of mankind.

Greater awareness of the distinctions between individual persons begins to take shape at the same time that there was an emerging sense of the qualities that bind all (property owning / white) men together. In the declarations Hunt examines, there is evidence of mankind’s demonstrable capacity to behave rationally, evidence that authorizes their creation and exercise of a new social contract. Different from how social relations were organized prior to this period, this focus on relations, that are defined in terms of the capacity for rational thought rather than by god the sovereign, becomes the foundation for a new form of governance. Prior to this, people looked to the sovereign power (god’s representative on earth) to explain life. Along with an evolving understanding of the rights of men, there was during this period an emerging sense of “rationality,” a way of living in the world that, whether addressed explicitly or not, was often joined to race, class, gender, and sexuality, as a justification for those who were enfranchised and disenfranchised.

In chapter three, Hunt points to some of the disagreements among liberal political theorists during this period. Different arrangements of “natural rights” allow us to think critically about the way liberal civil society was organized. Writing in 1625, Hugo Grotius, for example, said natural rights were connected to life, the body, freedom and honor (2007:118). But, Hunt stresses, John Locke defined natural rights in terms that stressed a natural right to property, and, therefore, whether intentionally or not, engineered rights in terms that did not challenge slavery. As we move forward, we will think more on how the connection of rights to property underlines how participation in governance is unfolding during this period.

Due Sunday, February 12th, by midnight. Word count: 400 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. If you paraphrase, make sure to include the proper citation.

In The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman explains that while women have no part in the original contract with civil society described liberal political theorists, they are not left out of the “state of nature.” In your own words, how would you explain the incorporation of women into a sphere that “is and is not in civil society”?