The feature image is the painting “The Tennis Court Oath” by Jacques-Louis David
This is a much-shortened version of a 10,000-word article on the history of human rights included in the Bloomsbury Academic online collection of articles on History: theory and method, intended for university teachers and students of history.
There is a consensus among human rights scholars and activists that the achievements of the human rights movement fall well short of its aspirations. Explaining the gap between the actual and the ideal is one of the central challenges of human rights studies. Human rights law by itself cannot explain the gap. Social science has made considerable progress in the past few decades in investigating the correlates and causes of the implementation and non-implementation of human rights norms. There remains, however, much contestation among social scientists about methodologies and conclusions (Fariss 2019; Cingranelli and Filippov 2020). Recently, historians have entered the fray.
Early histories of human rights were related mainly by lawyers, who traced human rights back to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: John Locke and the American and French revolutions were usually given starring roles in the story. Sometimes, the narrative was pushed further back to medieval natural-law philosophy, and to Aristotle and the Stoics. This traditional approach to human rights history was elaborated at length in two major works: Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution of International Human Rights; visions seen (1998) and Micheline Ishay’s The History of Human Rights: from ancient times to the globalization era (2004). Both Lauren and Ishay offered an advance-and-setback view of history, but nevertheless saw the history of human rights as a story of progress, albeit with much work still to be done.
Lauren’s historiography was challenged in 2007 by Reza Afshari, who argued that there was an “epistemological break” between premodern conceptions of justice and modern human rights and that social movements such as the anti-slavery campaign were based on single issues not universal rights. Discourses of the Global South changed the meaning of rights from the universal rights of individuals to the collective rights of states. The history of human rights showed that non-compliance with human rights norms was a product of history rather than a failure of political will (Afshari 2007).
In 2010 Samuel Moyn offered a more radical challenge to traditional histories in his much-discussed book, The Last Utopia: human rights in history. He argued that the human rights movement became significant only in the 1970s – human rights developments in the 1940s (UN Charter; the Universal Declaration) were stillborn – and were quite different from the rights ideas of the eighteenth century. The latter were part of a project of state- and nation-building whereas the contemporary human rights movement had replaced the politics of the state with a global morality that sought to limit state power. Traditional histories of human rights committed the errors of teleology and triumphalism. The appeal to “deep” history in the manner of Lauren and Ishay distracted attention from the explanation of the 1970s’ movement as the “last utopia” that had replaced older, discredited utopias and also from the political challenges currently facing contemporary human rights.
Miia Halme-Tuomisaari and Pamela Slotte, in their edited volume, Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (2015), accused international human rights law texts of telling a story of unilinear progress and the inevitable triumph of human rights. These texts misused history to “prove” their assumption that human rights were universal by their selective use of evidence. They mischaracterised historical actors as human rights activists regardless of their ideological motivations. They interpreted the past not on its own terms but as anticipations of a future of which past actors could not have been aware. They suppressed the contestations that always accompanied the making of rights claims. “Textbook” histories of human rights were therefore not simply histories but ideological legitimations of the contemporary human rights regime.
The critics of traditional human rights histories have gives us cause to rethink the history of human rights, but not all their arguments are compelling. The meaning of concepts such as “justice” and “rights” changes over time but Afshari’s idea of an “epistemological break” imposes the contemporary historian’s perceptions on a more complex history of continuities and discontinuities. The 1970s were certainly an important decade for human rights, but Moyn underestimates continuities between both the eighteenth century and the 1940s and later developments of human rights. Halme-Tuomisaari and Slotte identify some oversimplifications in “textbook” histories of human rights, but, ironically, oversimplify the historical narratives of writers such as Lauren and Ishay.
To know what we ought to do we must know who we are. History tells us that. It is a complex story of progress and backsliding. There are no guarantees (good or bad) about the future. If human rights achievements fall short of human rights aspirations, that is cause to rethink our ideas and practices. History enriches that task. It does not substitute for it.
Michael Freeman is an emeritus professor in the Department of Government, University of Essex. His current research interests are in the historiography of human rights, and in the connections between brain science, ethics, and political philosophy.
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