The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations by Benjamin Gregg (review)

In this book, Benjamin Gregg calls for a “post-metaphysical” approach to human rights (2), thus accepting the human origins of rights. Human rights, Gregg argues, are social constructs which have no biological or cosmological basis, and are thus open to cross-cultural borrowings. But this embrace of social constructivism is where Gregg and anthropologists who study human rights part company. Indeed, this book illustrates the significant gap between philosophical and anthropological approaches to human rights.

Gregg organizes his argument in three sections. In Part I (Chapters 1–3), he makes the case for what, in his Coda, he calls “a community of nation states practicing domestic cosmopolitanism” (210). In Part II, he explains how a human rights-centered “politics of persuasion” can function in university classrooms (Chapter 4), among post-Cold War Eastern European nation states (Chapter 5), and in new forms of digital technology (Chapter 6). In Part III, he responds to the challenge of patriotism (Chapter 7), seeks to differentiate between democracy and the rule of law (Chapter 8), and briefly discusses the efficacy of humanitarian interventions (Chapter 9).

In Part I, Gregg explains how a “human rights state” (not a formal state, but a voluntary group of individuals) can be the catalyst for developing an acceptance of human rights within existing nation states. This must be an organic movement, grounded within local communities, “in terms,” he argues, “that resonate with that community” (4). Once established, these local movements, composed of “ordinary people, not local elites” (38), will promote the acceptance of human rights through “institutionalized socialization” (6), the goal being an “assertive selfhood” (7) or, alternatively, a “politics of moral personhood” (71). This will require, he suggests, “an act of political imagination” (27) performed by members who “collectively authorize and recognize their own human rights” (28). Advocates will seize rights from the state (thus negating the claim that rights are granted by states) and thereby assert their own agency (as practitioners of rights). Through this process, members of human rights states will persuade others to follow.

Gregg distinguishes between (top-down) universal rights campaigns and a (bottom-up) persuasive project, arguing that while the former is imposed, the latter is a “project of potentially universal participation” and hence “a project of (socially constructed) universal validity” (10). He suggests that as the acceptance of human rights through persuasion increases, so too will the scope and number of human rights states, eventually leading to broad universal agreement on rights (15). By way of example he mentions non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as self-selected groups of individuals who seek to expand human rights.¹

In Part II, Gregg describes how university classrooms can be platforms for enabling students to develop a “human rights consciousness” (84). This will occur through the cultivation among students of a “human rights style” directed at two targets: nation states and “cultural beliefs and practices” (86). These targets signify Gregg’s adherence to liberal thinkers stretching back to John Stuart Mill, who in On Liberty (2006; originally published in 1859) defined the enemy of rights as not just the state, but, more importantly, society. “The despotism of custom,” Mill wrote, “is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to…the spirit of liberty, or that of progress and improvement” (2006:70). In Gregg’s hypothetical classroom, students are “Western youth” (109) firmly situated “in the West” (93–94). Beyond the reductionism (just who belongs to “The West”?), this perspective suggests not just that human rights are the domain of “The West” while “cultural beliefs and practices” are found elsewhere, but that a human rights state can exist separate from culture. In other words, human rights are supposed to stand against the coercive power of “culture” by transcending this, to a space beyond culture (Cowan et al. 2001:12, Goodale 2009:88–90).

But what clearly distinguishes this (philosophical) approach to human rights from an (anthropological) approach is the writing style. This...