"Clever and timely... Goodale complicates the presumed universality of human rights, providing an alternative history of the UNESCO process." -Lynn Meskell, Stanford University
This remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders-including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg-engaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrarypresents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today's human rights debates.
Since its adoption in 1948, historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was influenced by UNESCO's 1947-48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, that supposedly demonstrated a truly universal consensus on human rights. Based on meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contraryprovides a curated history of the UNESCO human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights. In collecting, annotating, and analyzing these responses, including letters and responses that were omitted and polite refusals to respond, Mark Goodale shows that the UNESCO human rights survey was much less than supposed, but also much more. In many ways, the intellectual struggles, moral questions, and ideological doubts among the different participants who both organized and responded to the survey reveal a strikingly critical and contemporary orientation, raising similar questions at the center of current debates surrounding human rights scholarship and practice.
Autorentext
Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. The author or editor of 12 other volumes, his most recent book is Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (2017).
Klappentext
This remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders-including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg-engaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrarypresents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today's human rights debates.
Since its adoption in 1948, historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was influenced by UNESCO's 1947-48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, that supposedly demonstrated a truly universal consensus on human rights. Based on meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contrary provides a curated history of the UNESCO human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights. In collecting, annotating, and analyzing these responses, including letters and responses that were omitted and polite refusals to respond, Mark Goodale shows that the UNESCO human rights survey was much less than supposed, but also much more. In many ways, the intellectual struggles, moral questions, and ideological doubts among the different participants who both organized and responded to the survey reveal a strikingly critical and contemporary orientation, raising similar questions at the center of current debates surrounding human rights scholarship and practice.
This volume contains letters and survey responses from Jacques Havet, Jacques Maritain, Arnold J. Lien, Richard P. Mckeon, Quincy Wright, Levi Carneiro, Arthur H. Compton, Charles E. Merriam, Lewis Mumford, E. H. Carr, John Lewis, Harold J. Laski, Serge Hessen, John Somerville, Boris Tchechko, Luc Somerhausen, Hyman Levy, Ture Nerman, R. Palme Dutt, Maurice Dobb, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Marcel De Corte, Pedro Troncoso Sánchez, Mahatma Gandhi, Chung-Shu Lo, Kurt Riezler, Inocenc ArnoSt Bláha, Hubert Frère, M. Nicolay, W. Albert Noyes, Jr., Aldous Huxley, Ralph W. Gerard, Johannes M. Burgers, Humayun Kabir, A. P. Elkin, S. V. Puntambekar, Leonard Barnes, Benedetto Croce, Jean Haesart, F. S. C. Northrop, Peter Skov, Emmanuel Mounier, Maurice Webb, John Macmurray, Julius Moór, L. Horváth, Alfred Weber, Don Salvador De Madariaga, Frank R. Scott, Jawaharlal Nehru, Margery Fry, Isaac Leon Kandel, René Maheu, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Morris L. Ernst, Arnold Schoenberg, W. H. Auden, Melville Herskovits, Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, Ernest Henry Burgmann, Herbert Read, and T. S. Eliot.
Inhalt
The volume's first expository chapter provides a detailed history of the UNESCO human rights survey. The chapter describes the origins of the survey; its development under the leadership of Julian Huxley and Jacques Havet; its conclusion in 1948; and its later rediscovery by human rights historians in the late 1990s. The chapter also situates the UNESCO human rights survey within the broader history of human rights and the history of the early postwar years more generally. Finally, the chapter discusses the UNESCO human rights process in relation to narratives, or myths, about important values like universality and shows how these narratives have been constructed within ideological currents at the center of human rights scholarship and activism.
The volume's second expository chapter provides an interpretative framework for understanding the dozens of essays, letters, and memoranda about the UNESCO human rights survey that are published in the chapters, many for the first time. The chapter describes the logic behind the volume's internal organization and the criteria through which the clusters of essays and letters were chosen. These clusters cover topics such as liberalism, history, socialism, technology, duties, and freedoms.
Chapter 3 reproduces the memorandum and cover letter that UNESCO sent to many people and institutions around the world asking them to reflect on the question of human rights so that UNESCO could write a report to be used by the UN Human Rights Commission.
The volume's final chapter reproduces the official report sent on behalf of the UNESCO Committee of Experts to the UN Commission on Human Rights based on the 2-year human rights survey. Although the report did not carry authorial attribution, it was written by Richard McKeon, one of the committee members. The approach taken in the report largely reflects his own perspectives on human rights, perspectives that are found in his individual essay on human rights, which appears in Chapter Five.
Chapter 6 reproduces that Foreword and Introduction to the volume that UNESCO published in 1949 based on the 1947-1948 human rights survey. The Foreword was written by Jacques Havet and the Introduction by Jacques Maritain. The 1949 UNESCO publication was the basis for our historical understanding of the UNESCO human rights survey until the publication of the current volume.
These seven selections represent …