Imperialists for “Human Rights”

The language of “human rights” has become the language of Western aggression.

by Bécquer Seguín

JACOBIN - 12/19/14

Historical writing comes in different shapes and sizes. Seed-like microhistories — the kind Jill Lepore has popularized in recent years in the pages of the New Yorker — start small before blossoming out into the air of the present and digging their roots into the soil of age-old questions. Inflated global histories, by contrast, swiftly bounce like a beach ball from one event, country, or time period to another, covering in a handful of pages what other scholars might in a lifetime.  Acute in its attention to epochal shifts, the style of legal historian Samuel Moyn’s 2012 book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, might best resemble a scalpel. His is a reconstructive history whose procedures include trimming down sweeping claims and excising carcinogenic histories absorbed in a singular moment (i.e. the French Revolution).

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