Jeune Street

Samuel Moyn has penned a fascinating brief history of human rights for The Nation. He argues that the concept of human rights emerged in the context of state citizenship, but it has only matured through the belated evolution of international governance. In the 1940s, human rights presented an alternative to bloody collectivist ideologies:

Human rights came to the world in a sort of gestalt switch: a cause that had once lacked partisans suddenly attracted them in droves. While accident played a role in this transformation, as it does in all human events, what mattered most was the collapse of universalistic schemes and the construction of human rights as a persuasive "moral" alternative to them.

In the 1970s and 1990s, human rights took on new meanings as a global discourse developed, bringing with it demands for international law and governance. The question that Moyn leaves with us is: "What to do with the progressive moral energy to which human rights have been tethered in their short career. Is the order of the day to reinvest it or to redirect it?"

The lesson of the actual history of human rights is that they are not so much a timeless or ancient inheritance to preserve as a recent invention to remake—or even leave behind—if their program is to be vital and relevant in what is already a very different world than the one into which they exploded.