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Allons enfants de l’humanité the French and Human rights there can be fewer more appalling signs of our increasingly appalling times than the imprisonment without legal redress or terminal sentence of six hundred or so “enemy combatants” in the Guantánamo Bay prison run by the american government. Outside the legal jurisdiction of any country, not even that of the one doing the imprisoning, they are in what can rightfully be called a dystopian nonterritory, where there is no semblance of the human rights whose virtues america so often preaches to the world. national security, we are told, trumps any other considerations in the time of war, even when that war is undeclared and potentially interminable. it would, however, be too easy to attribute their plight to simple hypocrisy, although there is enough of that to go around. the recent disclosure of Henry Kissinger’s cynical absolution granted to the Chilean and argentine generals engaged in the violent suppression of dissent in the 1970s, for example, only confirms what we already knew all too well about the lip service paid to ideals by the practitioners of realpolitik. no one, in fact, will be surprised by the selective application of human rights principles even by the country that claims to be their foremost champion. But what is much more unsettling, and will be the focus of this essay, is the suspicion that the rationale for human rights may itself be problematic enough to make its unreflective evocation no easy matter. that is, however much we feel a strong bias toward the positive good that evoking human rights may do, close scrutiny makes it hard to ignore the internal contradictions, unintended consequences , and poorly defended premises that have always dogged the history of their propagation. although it is clear that human rights have been part of what allons enfants de l’humanité 187 Michael ignatieff has called “a wider reordering of the normative order of postwar international relations, designed to create firewalls against barbarism,”1 the basis on which they have been defended has always defied easy justification. ignatieff himself concedes that any attempt to find a solid ground for them as innate and universal leads into metaphysical swamps that are best avoided. it is far more productive, he concludes in frustration, “to forgo these kinds of foundational arguments altogether and seek to build support for human rights on the basis of what such rights actually do for human beings.”2 this may seem a strategy that comes uncomfortably close to the advocacy of useful myths espoused by theorists like Georges Sorel, but it candidly acknowledges the difficulty of cashing out the claims that are so often glibly made for the self-evidence of human rights. the difficulty of coming up with a serious defense of human rights became evident to me a few years ago, ironically in the context of reading through the first few volumes of the promising series of translations of recent French liberal theoreticians published by Princeton University Press and edited by Mark Lilla and thomas Pavel.3 in his introductory essay to the inaugural collection of that series, New French Thought: Political Philosophy, an essay titled “the Legitimacy of the Liberal age,” Lilla stressed the importance of the return to human rights discourse after a generation or more of neglect produced by the hegemony of historicizing Marxist and relativizing poststructuralist modes of thought in France.4 the volume itself has three short essays on the subject by Luc Ferry, Blandine Kriegel, and Stéphane rials. Later volumes in the series by several of the authors—notably Pierre Manent and Kriegel—elaborated on the theme.5 But what became quickly apparent to me was the lack of any meaningful consensus about the philosophical justification for human rights and agreement about the priority of some rights over others. One of the authors, more indebted to the theories of Leo Strauss than to anything normally labeled liberal, even went so far as to bemoan the american fetish of human rights as itself problematic . according to Pierre Manent, “On the tabula rasa of the continent, the appeal to rights gets carried away and loses patience; bursts of strident indignation disperse the already thin topsoil of human tradition; and from one side to the other, all elements of the human world are attacked in the name of human rights.”6 Manent also then went on to argue that all modern defenses of human rights, not merely those on our shores, are...

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