Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development

Across its first four decades of life, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was invoked to support an almost limitless range of causes and movements. Differences in emphasis and application to particular contexts were always envisaged as the Universal Declaration circulated across the world, and across time. This was intrinsic to its appeal, as a set of abstractions that transcended the specific and spoke to an enduring set of freedoms required for all, everywhere, and for all time. Rarely were local conditions likely to encourage a uniform enthusiasm for each aspect of its vision, or symmetry in the realization of its articles. The authors were no strict constructionists, and all imagined a living text.¹

By the 1970s, however, the Universal Declaration was almost too alive for its own safety. The manner with which the vision of 1948 was embraced had, almost from its inception, been partial. Yet as the Universal Declaration entered its third decade, there was an abundance of reference to the document that was discordant with its original purposes and meaning—and a growing competition within the language of human rights. After a brief phase dominated by benign lassitude, which extended into the 1950s, a constellation of competing ideas and programs had interlaced their priorities with terms from the human rights lexicon. Third world crusades for self-determination, economic development, global wealth redistribution, and cultural particularism each engaged human rights to underwrite their legitimacy. Western NGOs, most notably Amnesty International, and neoconservatives conflated human rights with a highly individualistic, and depressingly pessimistic, core of classical freedoms. Theirs was a similar revision of human rights as once defined—albeit one which involved subtracting from, rather than adding to, the concept.

All of these various movements held a degree of kinship with the vision of 1948, a nucleus of similarity sufficient to expropriate the latent power of human rights language. Each sought, or at least pretended to seek, emancipation of some kind. Nevertheless, the invocation of human rights in the course of these other crusades ultimately pushed the concept to its elastic limit. These ritualistic and often hollow recitations of the Universal Declaration had a paradoxical effect, elevating the profile of its terminology while compromising the legitimacy of the language that was being drawn upon. “Human rights” became an all-purpose lexical carapace, under which all manner of dissonant causes were pursued. As human rights proliferated, its meaning pluralized, becoming the moral lingua franca not of one world but conflicting ones. Neoconservatives dismembered the Universal Declaration from the right. Soviet bloc functionaries drowned it in the opaque verbiage of socialist legality. Revitalized NGOs pared it back to a minimalist humanitarian palliation. Third World developmentalists [End Page 127] deduced “New World” and “New International” orders from single articles. Western European Social and Christian Democrats, Commonwealth and American progressives, and the vanishingly small population of Asian, African, and Latin American democracies quietly wandered through this contest of extremities with a kind of weighted average position that at least approximated what had been adopted on December 10, 1948. All of them spoke of human rights.

Recent histories of human rights have emphasized the importance of the 1970s as the “breakthrough” moment for human rights. Current scholarship locates the 1970s as the epicenter of the modern movement, when human rights made a precipitous transition from juridical novelty to mass phenomenon.² The prime exponent of the “breakthrough” thesis, Samuel Moyn, has explicitly cleaved this decade from all that preceded it.³ Human rights were born without much by way of precedent or precursor genealogy, in a telescoped process of historical rupture. Recognition of the 1970s as a decisive point in the history of human rights has been an important corrective to narratives of gradual, but inevitable, progress that once characterized the historiography.⁴ Yet the nature of the “breakthrough,” and its implications, have yet to be characterized. Moyn’s impressive work, breviary of the “new history of human rights,” tends to measure “breakthrough” through the prism of visibility, a logical and meaningful measure of the stunning rise of the term. Intensity of utilization, which Moyn numerically quantifies in a telling appendix...