Human Rights and Revolutions (review)

There is no historical precedent for the emergence in our time of secular global citizen movements linked by shared beliefs and committed to putting those beliefs into practice. Three such movements became significant factors in shaping public policy in much of the world starting in the late 1960s and 1970s: the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the human rights movement. Each of these causes has brought about major shifts in public policy.

Arguably, the last of these, the international human rights movement, has had the greatest impact. It had a part in the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and the consequent end of the Cold War. Earlier in that decade, the human rights movement played a role in the shifts from military dictatorship toward democracy in much of Latin America and in such countries of East Asia as the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. A few years later, the movement contributed to the end of apartheid in South Africa and, thereafter, to the emergence of more-or-less democratic governments in numerous other countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Although the human rights movement in authoritarian China has been harshly suppressed, the Chinese authorities evidently fear its reemergence. Chinese leaders have defied international opinion in periodically cracking down on those who speak out about rights. The human rights movement influences relations between states, having inaugurated an era in which a substantial number of heads of state and heads of government have been put on trial before national and international courts for rights violations. The movement is also shaping the conduct of armed conflict by focusing international public attention on violations of the laws of war. Thousands of human rights organizations operate in all parts of the world except in countries like North Korea that make this impossible. Many millions of persons worldwide identify with the international human rights movement.

Lynn Hunt, a professor of modern European history at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a leading historian of human rights. In her opening essay in this collection, she points out that “something happened to the conception of rights between 1689 and 1776 to 1789 to transform them from the rights of a particular people, such as ‘freeborn English men’ into universal natural rights, the French droits de l’homme” (p. 7). Hunt attributes this development to an Enlightenment transformation in attitudes toward individual lives. Such practices as torture or slavery acquired a significance that they lacked previously. Cultural innovations such as the novel and theatrical performances, according to Hunt, helped to establish the concept of individual autonomy and contributed to the acceptance of natural law as the foundation for rights.

Another contributor to this collection, David Zaret, a professor of sociology at Indiana University, also sees the emergence of human rights as a phenomenon linked to the rise in importance of the individual and what he terms “the moral precedence of the individual over society” (p. 50). According to Zaret, the transformation in thinking that elevated the importance of the individual took place more than a century earlier than the period on which Hunt focuses. It was the Levellers in England in the 1640s, he argues, who bequeathed to us the concept of inalienable rights. In protesting tyrannical acts by the Long Parliament, the Levellers went beyond claims that their own privileges had been violated. They embraced principles of democratic citizenship for all, including the right to express grievances and to petition for redress. Zaret notes that one of the Levellers’ demands was for the Long Parliament to “hear all voices and judgments, which they can never do but by giving freedom to the press” (p. 61).

Whether contemporary Western ideas about rights developed in the middle of the seventeenth century, as David Zaret argues, or emerged in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as Lynn Hunt contends, they have yet to establish themselves firmly in much of the rest of the world. Several...