Christian Human Rights

Samuel Moyn's book on the development of human rights in the twentieth century has been on my 'to read' list for a while now.

His thesis seems to be that modern human rights represents a very recent secular takeover (roughly 1970s onwards) of a Christian movement which arose in the 1930s as a response to the encroachment upon Christianity of totalitarian regimes. A key figure in this Christian movement was Jacques Maritain. If he's right in this historical analysis, human rights owes far more to Christianity (and in particular Catholicism) than it does to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Moyn celebrates the 'capture' of the concept of human rights by secularism and its broadening to concerns wider than the essentially defence of subsidiarity that was key to the original Catholic position.

I still haven't read the book! (I have, however, finally bought a copy so I guess that's progress!) There's a very helpful podcast of an interview with Samuel Moyn here. There's also a series of papers on The Immanent Frame website discussing his thesis here.

My hunch would be that he's right to emphasize the role of Catholic thinkers such as Maritain in the development of modern human rights, but wrong to regard its post-Christian development with favour. Not much of a surprise there perhaps! But apart from the kneejerk reaction resulting from personal prejudices, I am for many reasons philosophically suspicious of recent developments in the understanding of human dignity, the concept which in Moyn's view (rightly, I think) underpins modern human rights, and view with favour an understanding of government which allows and indeeds encourages the subsidiarity of the little platoons of society. Anway, we'll see...

Here's a taster from Moyn's introductory essay on the book from The Immanent Frame discussion:

The essay on so-called “personalism” under scrutiny here deals heavily with Catholic publicist Jacques Maritain, certainly the most prominent philosophical defender of universal human rights in the 1940s, and a pivotal player in the political transformation of Christianity across the transwar divide. The other chapters in Christian Human Rights, when it appears, will start with the history of human dignity in constitutions: the first of this sort was Ireland’s 1937 document, not coincidentally perhaps also the first Christian Democratic constitution in history; then there was Marshal Philippe Pétain’s abortive 1944 French constitution; and only later the postwar West European constitutions. The book looks at Protestant versions of Christian human rights, notably in the work of Gerhard Ritter, the dean of German historians of the period. If Maritain was the leading theoretician of human rights then, Ritter was their preeminent historian. Finally, the book concludes with an account that offers some inking of the legacy of Christian human rights today, in European Court of Human Rights cases about the Muslim headscarf and the meaning of religious freedom.

In the 1940s, as much as in and through some of their legacies today, Christian human rights have not so much been about the inclusion of the other, but about policing the borders and boundaries at which threatening enemies loom. Human rights have a complex history, and it is—like all inheritances—worth tough criticism, not subservient adulation.