The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights Series) edited by Jan Eckel & Samuel Moyn (review)

I. INTRODUCTION

The Breakthrough,¹ as the title suggests, is a kind of sequel to the provocative work of human rights history’s current enfant terrible, Samuel Moyn. He co-edits this volume of contributed works with a kindred colleague, Jan Eckel, who teaches modern and contemporary history at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In an early footnote, Moyn recognizes the similarity of the project he and Eckel share: “[Eckel and I] propose somewhat different interpretations of why the decade [of the 1970s] was so pivotal.”² Moyn, until this year a professor of history at Columbia University, and who is also trained in law, will join the faculty of his alma mater, Harvard Law School, in the fall of 2014 as a professor of law. Provocation can, in some circumstances, lead to academic ascendency. Moyn’s earlier work, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), has become something of a bellwether in the field, the volume that must be responded to, whether by friend or foe, and the yardstick by which support for a certain view of human rights history, indeed of human rights themselves, must be engaged. The Breakthrough, in many ways, continues the same line of critique; in others, it challenges the revisionist project.

At face value, The Breakthrough is a fascinating collection of essays, all by historians rather than lawyers (other than Moyn), and all with what is said to be a shared thesis that something special happened in the field of human rights in the 1970s, something transformative and definitional for the global movement (hence the title). The contributions are framed by an opening descriptive essay by Moyn and a grand synthesis chapter at the conclusion by Eckel. The Eckel chapter, well written and clear, is a place for the casual reader to get a sense of the overall project of the book.

In his introduction in this volume, Moyn restates the thesis of The Last Utopia in a passage that bears extended quotation:

In particular, historians have begun to focus on the era of the 1970s, when—initial indications suggested—the idea of international human rights achieved a prominence that far outstripped even that of its founding epoch thirty years before. Amnesty International, the first human rights non-governmental organization of note, achieved striking visibility, especially through its Campaign Against Torture [and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977]. Soviet dissidents rallied around human rights, attracting a massive global audience for their heroism in facing down a totalitarian state. After coups in the Southern Cone of the Americas beginning in the summer of 1973, appeals to human rights became a slogan of local response and international solidarity. The Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975, incorporating what became a fateful “third basket” of human rights principles. And President Jimmy Carter, beginning in January 1977, gave the United States a “human rights policy.” Contemporaries registered these separate but converging events as an explosion.³

This, then, is both the central thesis of Moyn’s revisionist work itself, and is more fully explored in this collection of essays authored by a distinctly Western group of historians, an eclectic set of readings bringing in perspectives from around the globe on human rights developments during the 1970s. In fact, the makeup of the contributors to this volume is one of several issues that drew my attention for this review. In addition to a short sketch on the contributors and their contributions, this essay will also explore four central questions: first, what is the “Moynian project,” the animus of this historian—cum—law professor; second, what are the 1970s, at least as they are defined here; third, what are the human rights about which this history is written, in both theory and practice; and fourth, what is the broader context of human rights histories within which this work...