Moyn's Christian Human Rights: A Comment

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12292
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018

REVIEW ARTICLE

Moyn'sChristian Human Rights: A Comment

Mark Gilbert*

First things first: Samuel Moyn has written a very good and thought‐provoking book. Although Christian Human

Rights is a reworked collage of previously published pieces, the various patches are sewn together skilfully to

construct a cohesive whole with a strong thesis.

This thesis is that the concept of human rights, which is usually associated with the secular left, has been in reality

more a ‘project of the Christian right’since the period between the two world wars. Moyn argues that from the mid‐

1930s onwards, Christians, especially Catholics, evolved and evoked the concept of ‘human dignity’as the centrepiece

of the political creed that they counterposed to the Nazi and Soviet variations of totalitarianism. One consequence of

this was that Christians began talking the language of human rights; began asserting in short that unless real, flesh‐and‐

blood human beings (not the abstract ‘individual’of secular liberal thought) enjoyed certain core human rights, then

society was unjust and out of harmony with natural law (and hence with the will of God). During the Cold War, this

innovation made possible a ‘tremendously fateful new opening’by liberals—traditionally, the principal opponents of

clerical interference in politics—to Christian (or ‘Judeo‐Christian’)‘values and interests’.Moyn contends that this open-

ing enabled ‘Cold War Liberalism’to be born: a political ideology that prized moderation and defence of the status quo

(a ‘guarded centrism’) against all ‘bids for secular progress’(p. 24). The diffusion and affirmation of the doctrine of

human rights, in short, is less one of the most important intellectual revolutions of our time than a pillar of the post‐

war conservative consensus and, as such, less of a force for liberation than its most progressive supporters imagine.

This thesis clearly upsets a great many preconceptions about the origins and political orientation of the idea of

human rights. Moyn is a resolute critic of all teleological narratives of the growth of human rights: in Chapter 3, which

is very largely an analysis of the writings of the ‘first historian’of human rights, the conservative German scholar

Gerhard Ritter, he comments dismissively that ‘contemporary scholars’have ‘moved to create a Whig interpretation

of human rights’. That is to say, convinced that ‘the idea of human rights is obviously a good one’, such scholars

have assumed that the ‘task of its historians is to show its emergence in the past in order to encourage its fortunes

now’(p. 104). Moyn's book is, at heart, an essay in how one should write the narrative of our times; it is a welcome

reminder that it is ‘fatefully easy’, to use Herbert Butterfield's formulation,to write history backwards, constructing a

teleological account of how a desirable present emerged thanks to the efforts of right‐minded leaders of good will.

In other words, in much the same way as contemporary scholars of European integration have tended to invest

the ‘European project’with immense historical significance, seeing the institutions of the EEC and the EU less as the

outcome of hard‐fought political compromises than as the outcome of the will of successive generations of European

leaders to overcome the continent's legacy of aggressive nationalism and war, so historians of human rights have

regarded the present‐day ubiquity of the concept as the result of the victorious struggles by progressives against

the barbarisms of the recent past (and the ‘realists’of the present day).

1

Moyn contends that the doctrine of human

*

The Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Europe, Bologna, Italy

1

I am reluctant to cite myself, but the critique Moyn advances of ‘Whig interpretations’of human rights mirrors my own historio-

graphical work on European integration. See Mark Gilbert, ‘Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European

Integration’, (2008) 46 Journal of Common Market Studies, 641–662.

DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12292

Eur Law J. 2018;24:349–353. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj 349