Human Rights. Michael Freeman

contrast with this psychological approach, French social science moved away from the concern with political power and natural rights to an interest in economics. Economic science would deliver what natural rights had failed to. Saint-Simon proposed the organization of industrial society on a scientific basis that assigned priority to the social and economic over the political, the collective over the individual, and the scientific over the philosophical. The intellectual world of liberal political philosophy was left behind. The Lockean theory of property rights was transformed into the search for the laws of material production. The Saint-Simonians concluded that Utilitarianism under the conditions of industrialism required socialism. The cause of the poor, neglected by the natural-rights ideologists of the French Revolution, was now transformed by the organized working-class movement.

      Karl Marx argued that the Rights of Man were the rights of egoistic man, separated from the community. The concept treated society as external to individuals and as a limit on their natural freedom. It purported to be universal, but in fact expressed the interests of the bourgeois class, and, by emphasizing the rights of individuals, concealed the structured inequalities of class-based societies. It assumed, further, that individuals were actual or potential enemies, which might be true under the conditions of capitalism, but was neither natural nor universal. It treated the pre-social, autonomous individual as natural, and political life as merely the means to protect the supposedly natural rights. This bourgeois conception of rights ignored the fundamental importance of labour, production and wealth to human well-being. Human emancipation, therefore, would be socio-economic (Waldron 1987: 126–32). Marx was unclear as to whether the Communist society would need no concept of rights or would eliminate the bourgeois concept of rights. This was to prove to be a serious defect in Marx’s theory when the twentieth century witnessed the development of strong Communist states with official Marxist ideologies and no commitment to individual rights. A neo-Lockean concern with the protection of individual rights from abuse of power by the state was to play an important role in the politics of actual Communist societies. Marx’s attitude to European imperialism and colonialism was ambivalent: on the one hand, he denounced their cruelties; on the other hand, he saw global capitalism as an inevitable stage on history’s journey to Communism (Paquette 2014).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Founding Fathers of sociology – Marx, Weber and Durkheim – were impressed by the massive social changes introduced by modern industrial capitalism, and sought to understand the larger historical forces that had brought them about. Individuals and their supposed natural rights dropped out of the picture. The first sociologists saw society as a natural entity to be understood scientifically, and not as an artificial creation to be shaped by ethical principles. If the concept of rights appeared in such analyses at all, it did so not as a fundamental philosophical category to guide ethical and political action, but rather as an ideological construct to be explained by social science. Rights survived in the US Constitution, and thinkers such as de Tocqueville, J. S. Mill and Weber worried about individual freedom in the age of large-scale, impersonal organization. The working-class and socialist movements nevertheless played a vital role in the struggle for economic and social rights.

      The concept of individual rights survived in the late nineteenth century, but rights were defended, not as natural rights, but as conducive to the common good, either on Utilitarian or neo-Aristotelian grounds transmitted through the philosophy of Hegel. Certain practical political questions – such as slavery, minorities and colonial rule – were sometimes discussed in the language of the Rights of Man, and some predecessors of modern human-rights non-governmental organizations, such as the French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, were set up. Other social movements and developments – such as the campaign for the social and political rights of women, workers’ and socialist movements, and the development of humanitarian laws of war – laid important foundations for the future of human rights in two particular respects. Firstly, they brought to the foreground economic and social rights, although these had not been ignored in previous eras. Secondly, the international solidarity of NGOs was pioneered as technological advances made international travel and communication faster and easier.

The First World War was a humanitarian disaster, but it also advanced the causes of economic and social rights, the rights of women and minorities, and the right of national self-determination against imperialism. At the end of the war the League of Nations was established, and addressed questions of justice in the colonies, minorities, workers’ rights, slavery, the rights of women and children and the plight of refugees. The Covenant of the League made no mention of the Rights of Man. Japan proposed a clause upholding the principle of racial equality, but this was defeated on the initiative of the USA and the United Kingdom. The League of Nations turned out to be a practical failure. It took the horrors of Nazism to revive the concept of the Rights of Man as human rights.

Conclusion

      The history of human rights is characterized by continuity, diversity and change. The concept has been continuously associated with struggles for freedom, autonomy and resistance to oppression. These struggles have taken place in diverse social contexts, and consequently these concepts have had different meanings. Nevertheless, there is a core to the history of human rights that enables us to see commonalities in struggles for freedom from Antigone to contemporary Syrian democrats. The value of human rights is not ‘self-evident’ nor can it be derived solely from positive law. The concept of human rights, with its different meanings in different contexts, has always been, and remains, contested. The history is both inspiring and troubling; this constitutes its relevance to human rights today.