31 Donnelly on the More Recent History of Human Rights
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Cornell University Press, 2013)
4. The American and French Revolutions
The transformation from ‘traditional’ hierarchical polities to ‘modern,’ egalitarian, rights-based polities was neither rapid nor easy. Three centuries separate the Peace of Westphalia from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, during which prolonged, intense, and often violent political struggles were required to expand both the substance and the subjects of ‘natural rights.’ Consider the American and French Revolutions.
These eighteenth-century revolutions were in many ways quite distant from their seventeenth-century English predecessor. This is particularly clear in a comparison between the 1689 English Bill of Rights and the 1776 and 1789 American and French Declarations.
The English Bill begins with “the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons assembled at Westminster” presenting “unto their Majesties . . . a certain declaration in writing.” The trappings are much more “medieval” than “modern”--as is the substance of their complaints. The heart of their case is that “the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counselors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom.” In other words, Parliament acted to replace a bad king with a good one, understanding the badness of the old king in terms of his offenses against the Protestant religion and the traditional laws and liberties of the land.
When they moved on to asserting their rights, they did so “as their ancestors in like case have usually done” and for the purpose of “vindicating and asserting their ancient rights and liberties.” In other words, when they appeal to rights it is as Englishmen, not human beings. And they conclude with an oath to “be faithful and bear true allegiance to their Majesties” and to “from my heart abhor, detest and abjure as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position, that princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any authority of the see of Rome may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever. And I do declare that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm.”
The English Bill of Rights, in other words, fits comfortably within the early modern framework of dynastic monarchy and religious warfare. William, who held a title from a small principality in southern France, and had succeeded his father as stadthouder of the Dutch Republic, become King of England as a result of his marriage to the daughter of James II, because of dissatisfaction with his wife’s father’s religion.
Compare the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. The claim of American independence was rooted not in traditional rights and privileges but in “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and [89] Nature’s God entitle them.” The Declaration of Independence is addressed not only to king and country, but no less importantly to “the opinions of mankind” and to “Nature’s God.” And it states a completely new conception of government.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Man, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
God is still present--but not religion. Rights and liberties remain central--but they are now natural or human rights, not traditional rights. Sovereignty resides not in the king or Parliament but in the people--who are free not just to replace a bad king with a good one but to replace kingship with a republic. Thus, in conclusion, “We . . . by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare [American independence].”
Even more radically, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen begins by asserting that “ignorance, neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption.” Its first three articles assert that “men are born and remain
free and equal in rights,” that “the purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” and that “the principle of sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, the mainstream of Western theory and practice included a new conception of political legitimacy based on a notion of (politically foundational) equal and inalienable rights of man. We should not, however, underestimate either the exceptional nature of these revolutions or their very severe limits.
The rights in question in the American and French Revolutions were indeed the rights of men, not of women, and the men in question were almost exclusively white. The US Constitution of 1787 not only entrenched the institution of slavery within the fundamental law of the new republic but infamously defined slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of electoral apportionment. The French Revolution in its most radical phase did for one year officially abolish slavery. The practice, however, remained essentially unchanged. [90]
Furthermore, property restrictions on the franchise continued to exclude many freeborn white male residents from full or active citizenship, particularly in the Old World. Economic and social rights were restricted largely to the right to property (although in America, where land still could readily be
seized from the indigenous populations, this was a less severe limitation than in the Old World). Many basic civil and political rights continued to be deeply contested. For example, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were intended and used to repress political speech critical of the US government. And it would take most of the rest of Europe until well into the nineteenth century or later to achieve even this level of progress.
5. Approaching the Universal Declaration
In the nineteenth century, the United States continued to expand the depth and range of its rights-based republic--at least for white Christian men—moving in a general direction that can plausibly be described as liberal-democratic. Progress in the Old World was more limited, and more sporadic, especially
in the first half of the century. After 1848, though, the tide shifted decisively against the monarchical vision of Europe’s future and in the ensuing decades universal suffrage for men became the norm.
Women still remained excluded. In the United States, even after the abolition of slavery, racial discrimination remained systematic, legalized, and extremely harsh. And overseas colonialism was in the midst a new phase of expansion.
Not until after World War II--key symbolic markers are Indian independence in 1947, Ghanaian independence in 1956, and the adoption in 1960 of UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples—did the Western world
really came to accept the notion of equal political rights for all . More precisely, the West finally came to accept that equal political rights could not be legitimately denied on the basis of “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, [or] birth,” as the Universal Declaration put it--or colonial status either.
Even this only takes us halfway to the Universal Declaration vision of human rights. The equal importance of economic and social rights in the Western world is largely a phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was considerable divergence, with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom leading and Finland, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Italy lagging (Flora and Alber 1981: 57). By the late 1940s, however, almost all Western states were not merely politically committed to becoming welfare states but well on the way to realizing that commitment.
Consider, for example, the flurry of legislation in Britain: the Family [91] Allowance Act (1945), National Insurance Act (1946), National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act (1946), National Health Service Act (1946), Children Act (1948), and National Assistance Act (1948).
The Universal Declaration did not reflect long-held Western ideas and practices. Western states did endorse the Universal Declaration, with considerable enthusiasm--but largely on the basis of what those states had become over the preceding several decades. Roots (as opposed to suggestive intimations) of this conception of human dignity and human rights do not go back much beyond two hundred years before the Universal Declaration and the bulk of the gap between the mainstream of Western practice and the vision of the Universal Declaration was closed in the three or four decades prior to the Declaration.
6. Expanding the Subjects and Substance of Human Rights
The historical development of human rights has involved the interconnected expansions of both the list of human rights and the groups of Homo sapiens considered to hold them. Not only does John Locke’s list of natural rights to life, liberty, and estates fall significantly short of the Universal Declaration, Locke clearly envisioned them to be held only by propertied white Christian men. Women, “savages,” servants, and wage laborers were never imagined to be holders of natural rights at the end of the seventeenth century.
Over the succeeding three centuries, however, racist, bourgeois, Christian patriarchs found the same arguments they used against aristocratic privilege turned against them by members of new social groups seeking full and equal participation in public and private life. In each case, the essential claim was that however different (“other”) we--religious dissenters, poor people, women, nonwhites, ethnic minorities--may be, we are, no less than you, human beings, and as such are entitled to the same basic rights. Furthermore, members of disadvantaged or despised groups have used the rights they did enjoy to press for legal recognition of those rights still being denied them. For example, workers used their votes, along with what freedoms of the press and association they were allowed, to press to eliminate legal discrimination based on property.
The substance of human rights thus expanded in tandem with their subjects. For example, the political left argued that unlimited private property rights were incompatible with true liberty, equality, and security for workingmen (and, later, women). Th rough intense and often violent political struggles this led to regulations on working conditions, the rise of social insurance schemes, and an extended range of recognized economic, social, and cultural rights, culminating in the welfare state societies of late-twentieth-century [92] Europe. Th e Universal Declaration codified an evolved shared understanding of the principal systematic public threats to human dignity in the contemporary world (and the rights-based practices necessary to counter them). And, finally, the International Human Rights Covenants, by adding of the right of peoples to self-determination, expanded the subjects of human rights to all human beings everywhere on the globe.
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Cornell University Press, 2013)
4. The American and French Revolutions
The transformation from ‘traditional’ hierarchical polities to ‘modern,’ egalitarian, rights-based polities was neither rapid nor easy. Three centuries separate the Peace of Westphalia from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, during which prolonged, intense, and often violent political struggles were required to expand both the substance and the subjects of ‘natural rights.’ Consider the American and French Revolutions.
These eighteenth-century revolutions were in many ways quite distant from their seventeenth-century English predecessor. This is particularly clear in a comparison between the 1689 English Bill of Rights and the 1776 and 1789 American and French Declarations.
The English Bill begins with “the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons assembled at Westminster” presenting “unto their Majesties . . . a certain declaration in writing.” The trappings are much more “medieval” than “modern”--as is the substance of their complaints. The heart of their case is that “the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counselors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom.” In other words, Parliament acted to replace a bad king with a good one, understanding the badness of the old king in terms of his offenses against the Protestant religion and the traditional laws and liberties of the land.
When they moved on to asserting their rights, they did so “as their ancestors in like case have usually done” and for the purpose of “vindicating and asserting their ancient rights and liberties.” In other words, when they appeal to rights it is as Englishmen, not human beings. And they conclude with an oath to “be faithful and bear true allegiance to their Majesties” and to “from my heart abhor, detest and abjure as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position, that princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any authority of the see of Rome may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever. And I do declare that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm.”
The English Bill of Rights, in other words, fits comfortably within the early modern framework of dynastic monarchy and religious warfare. William, who held a title from a small principality in southern France, and had succeeded his father as stadthouder of the Dutch Republic, become King of England as a result of his marriage to the daughter of James II, because of dissatisfaction with his wife’s father’s religion.
Compare the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. The claim of American independence was rooted not in traditional rights and privileges but in “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and [89] Nature’s God entitle them.” The Declaration of Independence is addressed not only to king and country, but no less importantly to “the opinions of mankind” and to “Nature’s God.” And it states a completely new conception of government.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Man, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
God is still present--but not religion. Rights and liberties remain central--but they are now natural or human rights, not traditional rights. Sovereignty resides not in the king or Parliament but in the people--who are free not just to replace a bad king with a good one but to replace kingship with a republic. Thus, in conclusion, “We . . . by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare [American independence].”
Even more radically, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen begins by asserting that “ignorance, neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption.” Its first three articles assert that “men are born and remain
free and equal in rights,” that “the purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” and that “the principle of sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, the mainstream of Western theory and practice included a new conception of political legitimacy based on a notion of (politically foundational) equal and inalienable rights of man. We should not, however, underestimate either the exceptional nature of these revolutions or their very severe limits.
The rights in question in the American and French Revolutions were indeed the rights of men, not of women, and the men in question were almost exclusively white. The US Constitution of 1787 not only entrenched the institution of slavery within the fundamental law of the new republic but infamously defined slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of electoral apportionment. The French Revolution in its most radical phase did for one year officially abolish slavery. The practice, however, remained essentially unchanged. [90]
Furthermore, property restrictions on the franchise continued to exclude many freeborn white male residents from full or active citizenship, particularly in the Old World. Economic and social rights were restricted largely to the right to property (although in America, where land still could readily be
seized from the indigenous populations, this was a less severe limitation than in the Old World). Many basic civil and political rights continued to be deeply contested. For example, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were intended and used to repress political speech critical of the US government. And it would take most of the rest of Europe until well into the nineteenth century or later to achieve even this level of progress.
5. Approaching the Universal Declaration
In the nineteenth century, the United States continued to expand the depth and range of its rights-based republic--at least for white Christian men—moving in a general direction that can plausibly be described as liberal-democratic. Progress in the Old World was more limited, and more sporadic, especially
in the first half of the century. After 1848, though, the tide shifted decisively against the monarchical vision of Europe’s future and in the ensuing decades universal suffrage for men became the norm.
Women still remained excluded. In the United States, even after the abolition of slavery, racial discrimination remained systematic, legalized, and extremely harsh. And overseas colonialism was in the midst a new phase of expansion.
Not until after World War II--key symbolic markers are Indian independence in 1947, Ghanaian independence in 1956, and the adoption in 1960 of UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples—did the Western world
really came to accept the notion of equal political rights for all . More precisely, the West finally came to accept that equal political rights could not be legitimately denied on the basis of “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, [or] birth,” as the Universal Declaration put it--or colonial status either.
Even this only takes us halfway to the Universal Declaration vision of human rights. The equal importance of economic and social rights in the Western world is largely a phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was considerable divergence, with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom leading and Finland, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Italy lagging (Flora and Alber 1981: 57). By the late 1940s, however, almost all Western states were not merely politically committed to becoming welfare states but well on the way to realizing that commitment.
Consider, for example, the flurry of legislation in Britain: the Family [91] Allowance Act (1945), National Insurance Act (1946), National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act (1946), National Health Service Act (1946), Children Act (1948), and National Assistance Act (1948).
The Universal Declaration did not reflect long-held Western ideas and practices. Western states did endorse the Universal Declaration, with considerable enthusiasm--but largely on the basis of what those states had become over the preceding several decades. Roots (as opposed to suggestive intimations) of this conception of human dignity and human rights do not go back much beyond two hundred years before the Universal Declaration and the bulk of the gap between the mainstream of Western practice and the vision of the Universal Declaration was closed in the three or four decades prior to the Declaration.
6. Expanding the Subjects and Substance of Human Rights
The historical development of human rights has involved the interconnected expansions of both the list of human rights and the groups of Homo sapiens considered to hold them. Not only does John Locke’s list of natural rights to life, liberty, and estates fall significantly short of the Universal Declaration, Locke clearly envisioned them to be held only by propertied white Christian men. Women, “savages,” servants, and wage laborers were never imagined to be holders of natural rights at the end of the seventeenth century.
Over the succeeding three centuries, however, racist, bourgeois, Christian patriarchs found the same arguments they used against aristocratic privilege turned against them by members of new social groups seeking full and equal participation in public and private life. In each case, the essential claim was that however different (“other”) we--religious dissenters, poor people, women, nonwhites, ethnic minorities--may be, we are, no less than you, human beings, and as such are entitled to the same basic rights. Furthermore, members of disadvantaged or despised groups have used the rights they did enjoy to press for legal recognition of those rights still being denied them. For example, workers used their votes, along with what freedoms of the press and association they were allowed, to press to eliminate legal discrimination based on property.
The substance of human rights thus expanded in tandem with their subjects. For example, the political left argued that unlimited private property rights were incompatible with true liberty, equality, and security for workingmen (and, later, women). Th rough intense and often violent political struggles this led to regulations on working conditions, the rise of social insurance schemes, and an extended range of recognized economic, social, and cultural rights, culminating in the welfare state societies of late-twentieth-century [92] Europe. Th e Universal Declaration codified an evolved shared understanding of the principal systematic public threats to human dignity in the contemporary world (and the rights-based practices necessary to counter them). And, finally, the International Human Rights Covenants, by adding of the right of peoples to self-determination, expanded the subjects of human rights to all human beings everywhere on the globe.
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