Self-Evident Truths?

Human Rights and the Enlightenment (The Oxford Amnesty Lectures)

Kate E. Tunstall, Kate E. Tunstall

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441132451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The keywords of the Enlightenment-freedom, tolerance, rights, equality-are today heard everywhere, and they are used to endorse a wide range of positions, some of which are in perfect contradiction. While Orwell's 1984 claims that there is one phrase in the English language that resists translation into Newspeak, namely the opening lines of that key Enlightenment text, the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...', we also find the Wall Street Journal saying of the Iraq War that the US was 'fighting for the very notion of the Enlightenment'. It seems we are no longer sure whether these truths are self-evident nor quite what they might mean today. Based on the critically acclaimed Oxford Amnesty Lectures series, this book brings together a number of major international figures to debate the history of freedom, tolerance, equality, and to explore the complex legacy of the Enlightenment for human rights. The lectures are published here with responses from other leading figures in the field.

PART ONE

Human rights today: An Enlightenment legacy?

1

Rethinking human rights and Enlightenment: A view from the twenty-first century

James Tully

The Oxford Amnesty Lecture Series invited ‘speakers to explore both the historic contexts from which rights emerged, and what an understanding of this history might mean for their relevance and, more importantly, their status as truths today’. This is a weighty historical task. I can only begin to explore the surface in my simple historical approach. If we approach rights as tools or equipment for getting things done by individuals and groups in the multiplicity of relationships in which they live and act, then I argue that we can distinguish at least two distinctive traditions of human rights that stem from the European Enlightenment: that is, two ways of thinking and acting with rights in fields of relationships. These traditions overlap and criss-cross in complex ways historically and in the present. Nevertheless, explicating their dissimilarities, and the differences these make in practice, helps in clarifying the struggles both with and over human rights today.

The first tradition is alluded to in the title of the lecture series. It claims that human rights are something that can be unilaterally declared by an authority because they are self-evident universal truths that are beyond debate. These universal human rights presuppose and are exercised in a universal set of modern legal, political and economic institutions. These universal institutions have to be coercively imposed prior to the exercise of human rights since they are the pre-condition of the exercise of human rights. Among these universal institutions is the modern state, which establishes the basis for human rights and coercively remedies their violations. To declare, project and then spread these institutions around the world; to be socialized into them; and to exercise human rights within them is to be on the universal path of development to a universal endpoint, which is called the modern Enlightenment. This tradition became dominant in the nineteenth century and it remains paramount today. It is the view of human rights from the perspective of a legislator who has the power to project rights and institutions over the world. I call it the Enlightenment project or the high Enlightenment tradition of human rights.¹

The second tradition claims that human rights are proposals. They need to be proposed to fellow citizens by fellow citizens, rather than declared by an authority. The reason for this is that human rights are not self-evident, but, rather, they are always open to question and critical examination by the humans who are subject to them. They gain their normative force by being reflexively tested, interpreted and negotiated en passant. Moreover, there is not one universal set of institutions in which human rights can be exercised. There is a plurality of political, economic and legal institutions in which human rights can be realized and these too gain their legitimacy from being open to the contestation of self-determining persons and peoples who are subject to them. Human rights and their institutions are not prior to democratic participation, but, rather, human rights and democracy go together, hand in hand. If follows that human rights and their institutions cannot be coercively imposed. They must be spread by democratic and non-violent means. Enlightenment does not consist in a developmental and institutional endpoint, but rather in the continuous deepening of the co-articulation of human rights and democratic participation in exercising and improving them, world without end. I call this the democratic or co-articulation human rights tradition. It has come together as a recognisable alternative tradition more slowly and recently than the predominant high Enlightenment tradition. However, I conjecture at the end that this democratic approach to human rights may now be gaining ground.

The first part of the lecture consists in setting out the high Enlightenment view of human rights and its history from the eighteenth century through to international human rights at the United Nations. The second part of the lecture consists in setting out the main features of the democratic approach to human rights in a series of historical and conceptual contrasts with the dominant tradition.²

Before I begin I would like to acknowledge my debt to three outstanding exemplars of human rights. The first is Howard Zinn. For me and millions of people in the global north and south he exemplified the democratic human rights tradition in his writing and his human rights activism.³ The second is Jeremy Seabrook of Oxfam, whose writings on the history of the inequalities between the global north and south are a constant inspiration.⁴ The third is Amnesty International. This organisation is one of the finest global exemplars of the democratic, non-violent and pluralistic ways to propose, discuss and spread human rights.⁵ As you can see from these three mentors, my lecture is not neutral with respect to the two traditions. My aim is to challenge the common presumption that one must either be for the Enlightenment project, which presents itself as the only way to think about and institutionalise human rights, or reject human rights altogether, and to show that there is another, better way of thinking about and actualising human rights that is alive and well in practice.⁶

Part I

The high Enlightenment project of human rights: The priority of the institutions of human rights to democracy

Introduction: Enlightenment human rights, institutions and processes

The high Enlightenment project of human rights consists of four main features. First, a person is recognized as having the status of a human being with dignity in virtue of a universal set of rights and correlative duties. Second, the possession, exercise and security of these fundamental rights presuppose an underlying universal set of legal, political, economic and military institutions of the modern state. Third, these universal rights and institutions are the product of historical processes of civilisation or modernisation. Fourth, this Enlightenment module of rights, institutions and processes develops first in Europe. It is then spread to non-European peoples, who are at lower levels of world-historical development, by means of European imperialism: first by colonisation and indirect rule, and then, after decolonisation in the twentieth century, by means of informal imperialism of the modernisation and democratisation projects of the great powers, the institutions of global governance, and the dependent elites in the former colonies.

Such a project makes sense only if we take into account a fifth self-evident truth of the Enlightenment. This is the transition from the pre-Enlightenment view that humans have rights and responsibilities in prior social relationships of cooperation to the Enlightenment view that modern rights are prior to and the condition of civilized relationships of cooperation and sociability. Subjection to and participation in the modern institutions of western law and private property, commerce, representative government and the public sphere pacify and socialize pre-modern or pre-civilized human beings. This truth is so self-evident that it does not have to be proposed to humans for their consideration. It can be declared unilaterally. Indeed, human beings reach the stage of sociality and reasonableness sufficient to reflect on and affirm this self-evident truth only once they have been socialized in and by these enlightened rights, institutions and historical processes.

Four types of human rights and underlying institutions

Let’s look at four main types of Enlightenment human rights and their underlying institutions. These types of human rights are not exhaustive and I do not mention every specific right within each of the four categories; rather, I focus on the core rights in each category. Other rights are normally subordinate to these high Enlightenment human rights.⁷

The first and most important tier of rights comprises civil rights. These are the negative liberties of modern subjects. These rights consist of: the liberty of the individual or corporate person of free speech, thought, conscience and faith, of formal equality before the law, and of the economic liberty to own property and enter into contracts. At the centre of civil rights is the modern civil liberty to enter into the private economic sphere, to engage in commerce or market freedoms and free trade, and to be protected from interference. This first tier of rights of modern liberty is primary; it is literally the liberty of the moderns. It acts as a kind of sheet-anchor with respect to other rights.

The first tier of human rights presupposes not only the rule of modern law that underpins it and the modern state that enforces it, but also a set of legal and economic institutions in terms of which it makes sense. That is, for us to be able to exercise our market freedoms in the private sphere there must be capitalist markets, the dispossession of the people from other relationships to their land and resources by means of the often violent and destructive establishment of private property, labour markets and corporations, and the corresponding systems of legal rights.

This first tier of modern civil rights – the liberties of the moderns – is paramount. It is the right not to be interfered with in these activities by the demos. In addition, it provides the major justification for the global spread of these legal and economic preconditions and for the opening of societies to free trade, that is, economic modernisation.

The second tier of modern rights comprises the political rights. These are rights to participate in representative elections, the public sphere and civil society. Like the first tier of modern civil rights, participatory rights presuppose underlying institutions in which they can be exercised: that is, representative governments, political parties, elections, the public sphere and civil societies, and the differentiation between private and public spheres.

The imposition of these modern, centralized institutions presupposes the processes that remove the multiplicity of other forms of citizen-participation in other forms of government; and the socialisation of citizens into this modern mode of representative participation. Citizens do not exercise powers of self-government. They are said to ‘delegate’ these to representatives. Citizens exercise communicative powers in elections and public spheres through official channels, and with the hope of influencing voting behaviour and public policy.

The political rights of modern participation in politics are subordinate to the first tier of civil rights of market freedoms in the private sphere in four ways. First, historically, rights of participation in modern representative institutions are said to come along after processes of modernisation set the underlying economic institutions of modern commercial freedom in place. The processes of economic modernisation are said to require more dictatorial forms of rule initially, such as colonisation, slavery, indentured labour discipline, military rule, structural adjustment, military intervention and reconstruction, and so on. Once the modern discipline of labour market competition is established, people can begin to exercise their modern participatory rights; yet under the tutelage of colonial powers, and, after decolonisation, the tutelage of modern advisors, non-governmental organisations and the policies of democratisation of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Second, the rights of modern participation are optional: one is a citizen in virtue of having the right to participate whether or not one actually exercises it. Third, the major justification for political rights, especially in the liberal and neo-liberal traditions, has been to protect individuals from interference or domination by the government or the demos: namely, to protect private autonomy. Fourth, the rights of citizen participation are restricted to exercise in the public sphere, not in the private sphere (as in economic democracy).

The third tier of modern rights comprises social and economic rights. These are rights that were won in response to the horrendous inequalities and exploitation of unregulated market freedoms of tier one civil rights and by means of political rights. In this tradition, they are not interpreted as rights of citizens to exercise their social and economic powers themselves, but rights that provide basic social assistance and help to integrate the unemployed back into the market.

This modular form of civil, political, economic and social rights, with their underlying military, economic, legal and political institutions of the modern state, was codified in the nineteenth century in the standard of civilisation in modern international law. The modern state-form was recognized as the highest form of political organisation. It alone was recognized as sovereign under international law. Although only European states approximated this norm of human organisation, it was said to be the ideal form for all peoples and societies. All other, non-civilized societies and their institutions were ranked by the new social sciences historically, normatively and cognitively in accordance with universal stages of historical development, from hunting-gathering societies at the bottom to modern European states at the top.

The Enlightenment Project of human rights was not only a project for Europe, but for the world. The European powers gave themselves a fourth human right, ius commercium or cosmopolitan right of free commerce and trade. This right is the Trojan Horse of European imperialism because it brings the institutions of tier one economic rights with it.⁸ It is the right of European traders and missionaries to enter into non-Europe societies and enter into commercial relationships with them. This involved opening their resources and labour to commodification and exploitation by the private and public companies of the competing European state empires. Non-European peoples were said to have a correlative duty of hospitality to open their doors to trade and commerce. If they failed to do so, then the great powers had the right to intervene, open doors, protect foreign investments from expropriation and so on. Finally, the European powers were said to have a duty not only the exploit the resources and labour of non-European countries, but also gradually to guide them up the stages of historical development to the civilized level.

Just like the other three human rights, this fourth universal right of trade, of exercising one’s market freedoms abroad, also presupposes an underlying set of economic institutions in the host country: namely the commodification of land and labour in accordance with western property and contract law. The coercive spread of the basic economic and legal institutions of private propert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• What are the Oxford Amnesty Lectures?
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One: Human rights today: An Enlightenment legacy?
• Part Two: Revolutions and declarations
• Part Three: Particular rights: The pursuit of happiness and freedom of speech
• Contributors
• Index