The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 197s

3. The Disenchantment of Socialism: Soviet Dissidents, Human Rights, and the New Global Morality

C h a p t e r 3 The Disenchantment of Socialism: Soviet Dissidents, Human Rights, and the New Global Morality Benjamin Nathans Since at least the eighteenth century, the hallowed story told about human rights is that human beings are born in possession of certain claims to moral worth that are bound up with the essence of being human and therefore are not limited to particular times, places, or political arrangements. Over the last several decades, historians of human rights, bound by the axioms of historicism and antiessentialism, have tempered this story by insisting that human rights were constructed, or even invented, by human actors responding to historically specific circumstances, whether the struggle between feudal aristocracies and overweening monarchs, the building of republican nation-states, or the moral abyss of genocide. Instead of the timeless narrative that human rights imply about themselves, in which they “always already” exist (if only in latent form), historical scholarship has emphasized origins and change over time, typically within an assumed framework of moral progress . Rather than being cast as transcendent values, human rights have been brought down to earth and given a history. But what kind of history? By selecting certain emblematic texts (while passing over others in silence), one can trace the origin of human rights to the Bible, to Greek and Roman antiquity, to medieval doctrines of natural law, to the Enlightenment, or to other privileged (read Western) sites. One can form a great chain of being that links these various sites to the present, or to parallel 34 Benjamin Nathans texts from non-Western traditions. In this manner, the accumulated legacy of decades (or centuries, or millennia) of human rights history can be mobilized to help explain (or buttress) their remarkable authority in our own time, whether in international affairs or in the way hundreds of millions of people articulate basic moral and political claims. One of the goals of the present volume is to take a close look at what is gained and lost in this transition from mythological to genealogical ways of thinking about human rights. In separate works, Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn have cast doubt on the claim that human rights in their current form—as a “central organizing principle of global modernity”—have a deep history in any meaningful sense. From different vantage points, they have proposed that the global prominence of human rights today is the result not of an accumulation of historical momentum starting in 1215 or 1789 or 1948, but of a rupture , a “tectonic shift” that gave rise to a new “morality for the world” in the 1970s.1 For Eckel, the transnational synergies that distinguish the recent blossoming of human rights activism demand a “polycentric” approach to their history as a methodological imperative for understanding the globalization of rights-based idealism. For Moyn, invocations of the “rights of man” prior to the twentieth century were invariably bound up with citizenshipbased projects that served to buttress, rather than constrain, the power of emerging national states. The swelling human rights rhetoric in the aftermath of World War II was stillborn precisely because none of the major actors proved willing to move away from the nation-building functions of rights inherited (at least in the Atlantic world) from the eighteenth century. Only in the 1970s did human rights succeed in transcending the framework of sovereign national states to become a truly transnational set of norms. For Moyn, moreover, the implosion of earlier utopian projects (such as socialism or world government) was an indispensable precondition for the human rights revolution of the 1970s. Not, however, because human rights are post-utopian: on the contrary, while the genealogical approach may have rescued human rights from their precarious mythological origins (which placed their foundations outside historical time), Eckel and Moyn caution that human rights remain a fundamentally utopian project (which places their fulfillment outside historical time). Stimulated by these bracing arguments, which have helped inaugurate a kind of rupture in scholarship on human rights, I propose to explore their application vis-à-vis one of the key arenas in which the alleged revolution in human rights unfolded, namely, the Soviet Union. The world’s first socialist Soviet Dissidents, Human Rights, and the New Global Morality 35 society is important for the global history of rights in the post–World War II era for several reasons. As a superpower, and as leader of the “second world...