ABSTRACT
The idea of human rights has offered a source of hope to many for its ability to articulate a sense of global justice. Yet, as we shall see, often human rights are opposed by nationalists of various shapes and sizes, and by others who presume that the nation-state even within these more globally interconnected times remains central to any ‘realistic’ politics. The issue that has begun to emerge within increasingly globally interconnected societies is that questions related to war and peace, ecological sustainability, feminism, cultural difference and poverty are not easily contained within national borders. While human rights can provoke considerable disagreement, there is little doubt that they remain one of the most morally and sociologically significant issues of our times. Looked at historically their origins can be traced to the American and French Revolutions and the emergence of the idea of the rights ‘of man’. As the historian Lynn Hunt (2007) points out, the paradox is that they originally gained ground in human societies built upon slavery and human coercion. What becomes curious then is that human rights were seen as self-evident by Enlightenment thinkers. The discourse of this period is that ideas of ‘rights’ are often presented as natural. Hunt argues that the individualism of human rights is based upon a set of cultural assumptions concerning the ability of being able to separate good from evil, to make moral judgements. The cultural understanding of human rights came along with certain exclusions such as women, children and those that did not seem to have the mental capacities to be able to engage in independent moral reasoning. Similarly, Joanna Bourke (2011) argues that the rights discourse that emerged from the Enlightenment not only assumed that they were restricted to the population within the borders of the nation, but it was only after the totalitarian crimes of the twentieth century were they assumed to apply to a broader spectrum of humanity. As is well known, this has led some critics to question whether human rights can be justified and indeed whether they can actually be based simply upon rational arguments. For Lynn Hunt, equally important to the history of human rights are notions of human sympathy and empathy. The idea that human beings had inner feelings came along with the rise of the novel and literature which encouraged the educated to sympathise with others across a number of cultural boundaries. Significant here is the recognition that human rights remain tied to historical understandings as to what we mean by humanity
or human qualities. If the ability to be able to use reason and think remains central to the idea of human rights then so do other features. The Enlightenment is significant not only because of the emphasis it placed upon human’s having rights, but also as Richard Rorty (1989) argues there is no ‘final language’ we can use in terms of what it means to be human. Within this setting the Enlightenment offers a new exploration of human qualities and possibilities, not a definitive understanding of human nature. Any understanding of human rights will need to be based upon an understanding of human qualities that are in Rorty’s (1989: 77) terms essentially a ‘poetic achievement’. From this point, however, Rorty takes the argument in a direction it does not need to go. If we can agree there is no master discourse in being human (despite what a variety of fundamentalists will tell us) this does not necessarily mean that we should all become ironic about the specifically cultural language we utilise. Read more critically, such a view cracks open a dialogue less about what human beings truly are but how they have become constituted and what they might become. Following the insights of much feminist scholarship we need to become aware of the politics of human qualities and examine how certain attributes have become associated with discussions of human rights, and then look at what that tells us about imagining more humane possibilities in the future (Werbner 1999). Thomas Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man’ (1987) became a best-seller in the eighteenth century communicating the ideas of the American and French Revolution to a global public. These rights were to be established against the rule of monarchies and entrenched forms of authority. The call was to begin the world again and establish the rule of law and democracy. The historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) argue that Paine and other radicals need to be understood against the backdrop of the revolts that accompanied the attempt to establish the eighteenth century Atlantic economy. The forcible dispossession that followed the Enclosure Acts led to labour power being made available for work in factories as well as on ships for colonialism. However, sailors brought back from their journeys tales of alternative societies that rested upon the dreams of communities not built upon the rule of capital and enclosed land. These stories questioned the ‘right’ of hierarchical rule from above and the possibility of living in more self-managed and less exploitative social relationships. Similarly as ideas of the ‘rights of man’ spread across the world this inspired a number of unexpected forms of resistance including indigenous resistance against the slave trade (James 1938/1980). There are, however, many ambivalences that can be associated with this historical moment. As Buck-Morss (2009) argues, if the idea of human rights helped bring slavery to an end it also helped give birth to the idea of free labour. The successes of abolitionists and slave revolts helped bring forth an ideology whereby liberty means both the rule of private property and the right to sell your labour in the market place. This means we have to be alive to the often ambiguous relationship between ideas of rights and freedom. For instance, Peter Linebaugh (2007) argues that the Magna Carta of 1215 is sometimes remembered as a direct precursor to human rights conventions given its ability to place restrictions on the rule of the powerful – but it also contains a less well
known charter called the Charter of the Forest. This second charter is less concerned with civil and political rights than with economic and social rights, which are relatively neglected. If the memory of Magna Carta is needed at a time when human rights abuse accompanies the ‘war on terror’, then the idea of social and economic rights also has a critical purchase in the time of neoliberalism. Alternatively the idea of Magna Carta as the people’s charter has been cited by the Zapatistas in Mexico in their struggle for land rights against the state and powerful corporations (Linebaugh 2007: 1-2). The rights of the commoner can be related to a number of struggles from ‘below’, including the English Levellers and Chartists and the Zapatistas and the Occupy movement all seeking to claim common ‘human rights’ as the people’s rights in opposition to the power of state and property (Boal 2001). The concern is less with the philosophical rigour of these claims (although sometimes this matters) but more with their capacity to resist the power of elites and serve the common cause of human freedom. This positions the idea of human rights within a complex force-field that includes a diversity of human qualities and competing understandings of history and culture.
