Historicizing the Historical Turn in Human Rights Studies

Nordic Journal of Human Rights ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rnhr20 Historicizing the Historical Turn in Human Rights Studies Origins, Inequality, and Neoliberalism in the Modern Epoch Tomas Wedin & Carl Wilén To cite this article: Tomas Wedin & Carl Wilén (04 Sep 2024): Historicizing the Historical Turn in Human Rights Studies, Nordic Journal of Human Rights, DOI: 10.1080/18918131.2024.2378647 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/18918131.2024.2378647 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 04 Sep 2024. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 5 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rnhr20 NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS https://doi.org/10.1080/18918131.2024.2378647 Historicizing the Historical Turn in Human Rights Studies Origins, Inequality, and Neoliberalism in the Modern Epoch Tomas Wedin a and Carl Wilénb a Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, Halmstad University/ Associate Researcher at Centre d’études sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron, EHESS, Paris; b Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History/Human Rights Studies, Lund University, Sweden ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The historical turn in human rights studies is characterized by a deep cleavage between scholars who locate the origins of human rights in the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century, and scholars who instead focus on the post-WWII period in general, and on the 1970s in particular as a breakthrough decade for international human rights. Against the background of what has been described as the threatened status of human rights today, we contend that the problem of origins remains as crucial as ever before, but that the way in which it is conceived is outdated and in need of reconceptualization in three ways. First, the historical turn should be seen as one body of literature with two distinct phases: one focused on origins and historical continuity and rupture, and a more recent, ongoing phase addressing the relationship between human rights and the concomitant neoliberalization of society and increasing economic inequality. We contend, secondly, that the debate itself needs to be historicized, and that the two thematic phases are rooted in two specific political, ideological, and economic contexts. The debate about origins relate to a pre-2007-2008 financial crisis era, marked by near-universal acceptance of human rights. Meanwhile, the issues of inequality and neoliberalism predominantly emerged in the post-crisis period as human rights faced more and more challenges. Thirdly, we present a theoretical argument for why the distinct issues constituting the two thematic phases should not be separated from each other. Indeed, in this setting, we demonstrate that the question regarding the relation between neoliberalism and human rights presupposes an account of the origins of human rights. Received 26 January 2024 Accepted 8 July 2024 KEYWORDS Human Rights; Historical Turn; Historicise; Modernity; Neoliberalism Introduction During the preceding decade, historians often described human rights as the doxa or lingua franca of our times, as one of those ‘ideas and sentiments that are tacitly presumed to be self-evident truths and not in need of any justification’.1 Today, few assessments CONTACT Carl Wilén [email protected] Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History/Human Rights Studies, Lund University, [email protected], +46735088073, Helgonavägen 3, Box 192, 221 00 Lund, (Sweden) 1 See, for example, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011), 1–2; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. 2 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN conclude that human rights are hegemonic; indeed, we are increasingly warned about their threatened or even undermined standing.2 It thus seems that diagnoses of the state of human rights have travelled a considerable way in a short time. The dramatic metamorphosis in perceptions of human rights calls for attention. In the vibrant field of human rights studies, human rights historiography—which emerged in the first decade of the new millennium in what has become known as ‘the historical turn’ or as a ‘historiographical victory’—is one of the subfields that has been most atten­ tive to the shifting societal status of human rights, in both past and contemporary history.3 This subfield has been characterized by a conflict between ‘deep’ and ‘revisio­ nist’ genealogies: whereas the deep genealogy locates origins in the West in the 18th century, revisionists argue that our 20th-century notion of human rights differs radically from earlier rights traditions.4 Nevertheless, as Devin Pendas has pointed out, both sides in this debate agree about the limits of accounts that trace human rights’ history back to secular and religious sources in antiquity and then forward via various progressive instantiations over millennia.5 In this article, we redirect the focus toward the historicity of the historical turn itself. In the first section, we challenge a common depiction of the historical turn as a single phenomenon, arguing that, notwithstanding some enduring themes such as decoloniza­ tion, a shift has emerged within the historical turn.6 We also complicate the image of the debate by offering an inquiry into crucial predecessors as well as heirs of the deep and the revisionist genealogy. In the second section, we suggest that the two thematic phases of the historiography of human rights are rooted in two political, ideological, and economic conjunctures. Dis­ cussions of origins, continuity, and discontinuity clearly address issues that stem from the period before the financial crisis of 2007–08, against the backdrop of an assumed uni­ versal acceptance of human rights as a lingua franca for international discussions. The problem of inequality and neoliberalism are predominantly entrenched in the long in History (Belknap Press 2010); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’ (2016) Past & Present 232 279; Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère, Le procès des droits de l’homme: Généalogie du scepticisme démocratique (Paris 2016); Lynn Hunt, ‘The Long and the Short of the History of Human Rights’ (2016) Past & Present 233 331. These diag­ noses united critics as well as advocates of a politics of human rights. 2 See, for example, Philip Alston, ‘The Populist Challenge to Human Rights’ (2017) Journal of Human Rights Practice 9 2; Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press 2013) 1–3. 3 The notion of a historiographical victory comes from Samuel Moyn, ‘The End of Human Rights History’ (2016) Past & Present, 233 207. ‘Rarely in intellectual history’, as the philosopher Seyla Benhabib has written of human rights in the 1990s and 2000s, ‘has a concept fired the imagination of scholars across disciplines as divergent as law, philosophy, history, and cultural studies during the same period of time.’ Seyla Benhabib, ‘Moving Beyond False Binarisms: On Samuel Moyn’s the Last Utopia’ (2013) Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 22 81. See also Adam Etinson, ‘Introduction’, in Adam Etinson, Human Rights: Moral or Political? (Oxford University Press 2018) 2, 6. 4 For the terms ‘deep history’ and ‘revisionist historiography’, see Philip Alston, ‘Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights’ (2012) Harvard Law Review 126 2063; Hoffmann (n 2) 280. For long and short human rights histories, see, for example, Roland Burke, ‘Flat Affect? Revisiting Emotion in the Historiography of Human Rights’ (2017) Journal of Human Rights 16 137. 5 Devin O. Pendas, ‘Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights’ (2012) Contemporary Euro­ pean History 21 96, 98. 6 Another limitation of the historicization of human rights is the exclusive focus on the historicity of human rights, without paying attention to how human rights in their turn condition our historicity; that is, what we might learn by analyzing human rights not as effect but as a cause of our historical orientation. For further reading on this perspective, see: Tomas Wedin, ‘Historicising Human Rights: The Debate Around Claude Lefort as a Missing Link in the Historical Turn’, under review for History of European Ideas. NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 3 moment that started in the financial crisis and continues today, wherein seeing the status of human rights as undermined is a rare example of consensus. In the third section, we demonstrate that the question of the relation between neoli­ beralism and human rights presupposes an account of the origins of human rights. More­ over, and more importantly, we argue that an account addressing both issues in one unified theoretical argument is the only way out of the conceptual mismatches and seeming impasses characterizing the historical turn, with some insisting on continuity and others on discontinuity. I. Origins and Genealogies We see the first phase of the historical turn as defined by two opposing genealogies. One genealogy—the ‘deep history of human rights’, most strongly defended by Lynn Hunt, as we will see—defined human rights as universal inclusion into the category of self-evident human equality. It also traced the sources of human rights back to the 18th century and suggested that their legacy was not yet exhausted. The other genealogy, defended by the revisionists and featuring Moyn as avant-garde, focused on the post-1945 context, with the 1970s in particular as a breakthrough decade for international human rights. The revisionist genealogy argued that no previous era had seen human rights mobilized and institutionalized on a wide scale over and against the sovereignty of the state. The human rights of the post-1945 era thus differed conceptually from their 18th-century counterparts—les droits de l’homme, the rights of man—that were used for purposes of state building. Revisionist histories also displayed sharper reservations about the poten­ tial of contemporary human rights—using phrases such as the ‘road to nowhere’ (Hopgood), the ‘last utopia’, and the ‘god that did not fail while other political ideologies did’ (both Moyn).7 Below, we engage with each genealogy in turn as well as their major forerunners and subsequent trends, in order to show how the second thematic phase of the historical turn differs from the first. Deep Genealogies The major forerunners of the deep genealogy are seldom noted in the literature. Far beyond the confines of the historical turn, they can in fact be found in a broad variety of accounts, which, from the 19th century until today, have turned to the 1789 French Revolution to investigate the critical horizon of the present in the break with feudal pri­ vilege connected to the abolition of l’ancien regime. For writers such as Jaurès, Lefort, Habermas, Balibar, Israel, and many others, the French Revolution was to be conceptu­ alized as a historical rupture that introduced a cleavage between legal and political forms on the one hand, and social or economic content on the other.8 ‘In the eighteenth century, the critique of social inequality was directed against the social effects of political 7 8 Moyn (n 1) 5; Stephen Hopgood, ‘Road to Nowhere’ in Stephen Hopgood, Jack Snyder, and Leslie Vinjamuri (eds) Human Rights Futures (Cambridge University Press 2017). Etienne Balibar, ‘Ambiguous Universality’ (1995) Differences, 7; Claude Lefort, ‘Droits de l’homme et politique’ (1980) Libre; Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford Univer­ sity Press 2014), 937; Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, vol. I (Les éditions sociales 1901) 381, 479; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (MIT Press 1996) 477–8. 4 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN inequality’, as Habermas wrote in 1996. This meant, he continued, that ‘legal arguments, that is, arguments based on modern natural law, provided a sufficient basis to plead for the equal liberties of constitutional democracy and bourgeois private law in opposition to the ancien régime.’9 When political inequality and exclusion came under growing pressure, and were abolished in several cases, social inequalities—‘the social effects of the unequal distribution of a non-political economic power’—appeared in the political programme.10 In our view, such accounts tend to unite in what Poulantzas once labelled as the ‘bour­ geois aspect’ of ‘the Jacobin ideology’, the tradition of ‘French “radicalism”’, and ‘the ideology of smallholders’, for which ‘socialism will not be a rupture from the French Revolution, but its consummation.’11 In turn, we can see that whereas the cleavage between politico-legal forms and socio-eceonomic content was the result of a rupture, it also connects our own time with the historical ‘Age of Revolutions’ because we still confront a cleavage between form and content in this regard, implicating that the critical resources of the French Revolution are not yet exhausted. Consequently, it would be accurate to call the genealogy of Hunt and others a deep rupture-and-continuity geneal­ ogy.12 The rupture with privilege is of no less importance than the continuity of human rights that ties our time to the 18th century. Hunt’s argument can be divided into two separate claims: one historical-sociological and one political.13 Combined, they amount to a bold and thought-provoking account of the history of human rights. Her historical-sociological claim is that a new form of inter­ individual sympathy emerged in the West in the 18th century; individuals began to experience a form of sympathy with other human beings beyond the explicit and omni­ present lines of demarcation separating individuals according to political-economic status. What might be referred to as a new emotional logic took shape, where an immedi­ ate sympathy of the heart between individuals successively replaced the orders of privi­ lege. A learning process of equality began to break down social and spatial differences that were previously taken for granted as natural necessities.14 What Hunt added to previous studies emphasizing emerging egalitarian norms, as articulated in, for example, de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (1835–40), was the role played by new reading practices in the West in the 18th century, in particular the widespread reading of epistolary novels.15 She argues that it was in part by reading 9 Habermas (n 8), 477–8. Ibid. 478. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (Verso 1978 [1968]), 179; the last quote is Jean Jaurès, cited in Pou­ lantzas’ book. 12 Our focus here is the main line of division in the historiographical turn in human rights. We have thus decided to leave aside the more peripheral, yet highly interesting, line of argumentation analysing the declaration of human rights as an explosion of impulses that go much further back in time and must be understood as the upshot of the political-theo­ logical transformations in Europe between the 12th and 17th centuries. For this discussion, see, for example, Michel Villey, Le droit et les droits de l’homme (PUF 1983); Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les droits de l’homme et le droit naturel (PUF 1989); Pierre Manent, La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme (PUF 2018); John Milbank, ‘Against Human Rights: Liberty in the Western Tradition’ (2012) Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1. 13 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (W W Norton 2007). Other contributions falling within this genre include, to name a few: Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown University Press 2011); Lefort (n 8); Balibar (n 8). 14 Hunt (n 13) 56–8. 15 Alexis de Tocqueville noted this shift of emotional register, arguing that a new form of emotional logic emerged with the democratic society taking form, based on an unrestricted empathy for one’s neighbour. See Alexis de Tocqueville, La démocratie de l’Amérique 2 (Gallimard 1981) 205ff. The theme, however, is a recurrent topic in Tocqueville’s œuvre 10 11 NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 5 epistolary novels, with their stress on the inner emotional life of their protagonists, that readers developed a new form of emotional sensibility, rendering them more attuned to the sufferings of their fellow beings—independently of their status and the social bound­ aries separating them. To support her claims, Hunt points to campaigns for the abolition of torture towards the middle of the century (abolished in France a few weeks after the storming of the Bastille). These changes testify to a transformation of the social imagin­ ary in the West, which mentally and emotionally paved the way for the idea of universally valid rights. The core of Hunt’s closely related political-theoretical argument is that the specific combination of the content of the rights and the solemn forms of the first rights declara­ tions set an example that contained a propensity to reproduce itself; rights questions, Hunt writes, ‘revealed a tendency to cascade’.16 Once the example was established with the Declaration of Independence from 1776 during the onset of the American Revolu­ tion, which cascaded soon again in connection with the universalizing aspirations of France’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen in 1789, new groups would follow suit and claim their rights by virtue of forming part of a common humanity. Human rights, Hunt argues, possess an ‘inner logic’.17 This inner logic has driven the expansion of human rights, and did not halt with the end of the Atlantic Revolutions in the early 19th century (which broached the questions of women, minority religions, people of colour, and enslaved people): it has continued to echo and infuse energies in protest movements ever since, from the abolitionist movement of the 19th century into the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and ensuing declarations.18 Hunt’s conception of an inner logic of human rights, implying a force stretched out diachronically, can be understood as a clash between particularity and universality in Habermas’ approach. Yet whereas Habermas concentrates on the emerging conflict between the universalizable claim of equality in the political sphere and the particularity stemming from inequality in civil society, Hunt, much like Lefort and Balibar, empha­ sizes that the abstract universality of the declaration of human rights as a political form is what made them into such a powerful force in the emergence of modern society. Also, the major issue for Hunt is manifest exclusions from human rights, whilst Habermas’ point is that universal inclusion can be accomplished without altering social inequality. Before turning to the revisionists, we must pose the question about the major devel­ opments within the deep genealogy. In the aftermath of Hunt’s intervention, many vari­ ations and additions connected to the deep genealogy of human rights appeared. While united in their historical scope and sometimes displaying an affinity with the theoretically informed analysis of the inner logic of human rights, they differ in focus, theoretical ambition, and historical cases. The notion of human rights’ inner logic and the focus and variations on this theme are found elsewhere in the second book. The novels that Hunt focuses on are: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1748), and JeanJacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). 16 Hunt (n 13) 147. 17 Ibid. 150. 18 Ibid. 150-175. 6 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN on the emotional learning process have clearly had an effect in the field, as have the specific cases and interpretations suggested by Hunt.19 Among the various deep genealogies, those provided by Martinez and Joas are of par­ ticular interest to us. The abolitionist movement in the 19th century takes centre stage in the case of historian Martinez, while only representing a brief stop in Hunt’s genealogy. For her 2012 book, Martinez investigated what were called ‘courts of Mixed Commis­ sion’—that is, slave trade courts in which lawyers from different countries aimed to promote the humanitarian principles that justified abolition. She argues that the Mixed Commissions deserve to be recognized as not only the first human rights courts in history, but also as an important factor in the abolition of the slave trade, which ‘remains the most successful episode ever in the history of international human rights law.’20 They can be seen pointing towards a history of continuity of international human rights institutions. As Martinez writes, ‘more than a century before Nuremberg, international courts in Sierra Leone, Cuba, Brazil, and other places around the Atlantic heard cases related to the slave trade, the original “crime against humanity.”’21 Using military force and inter­ national courts, slavery was eradicated by people and nations who had reached the con­ clusion that it was morally wrong, in combination with motivations of material selfinterest. Martinez thus aims to shed light on the parallels between tensions present then and now, such as between concepts of natural and universal law and law based solely on the positive enactments of a particular sovereign state; between religious and secular ideas of law and society; between European and non-European societies and cultures; between written treaties and unwritten customary law as the most important source of international legal norms; between national and territorial conceptions of jurisdiction and supranational or even universal jurisdiction.22 By such designs, Martinez seeks to redirect the focus of human rights studies away from ‘the conventional wisdom focused on the post-World War II period’, towards origins of an older date, including the 18th century.23 Another paradigmatic example of deep genealogy can be found in the work of the sociologist Joas, who paints a picture of historically cascading effects reminiscent of the image suggested by Hunt. Unlike Hunt, Joas posits that the central role played by human rights in modern society must be understood primarily as a manifestation of a process of ‘sacralization’ of the person. Drawing on Durkheim, Joas argues that sacrali­ zation is best understood as a form of transposition of sacrality onto the human person, with roots not least in the Christian tradition. A second key assumption in Joas’ account is how experiences of violence and the col­ lective trauma that follows it have served as vehicles for generalizing the values of human rights. For instance, he analyses the UDHR in the context of the Holocaust as a cultural 19 Alongside the scholars presented below, it is also worth highlighting: Lacroix and Pranchère (n 1) Susan Marks, ‘Four Human Rights Myths’ in David Kinley, Wojciech Sadurski, and Kevin Walton (eds) Human Rights: Old Problems, New Pos­ sibilities (Edward Elgar Publishing 2013). The focus on emotions has so far gained least acknowledgement and concrete attempts at further development within the historical turn. On human rights history and emotions, see Burke (n 4) 16. 20 Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press 2012) 13, see also pp. 6, 15. 21 Ibid. 6, see also p. 13. 22 Ibid. 14. 23 Jenny S. Martinez, ‘Human Rights and History’, (2013) Harvard Law Review 126 232. NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 7 trauma based on violence, which created the possibility of an ‘epistemic foundation’.24 The ways in which these experiences were canalized enabled agreement among conflict­ ing religious and ideological positions. Joas also takes the cultural plurality of the authors of the UDHR as evidence for his conclusions.25 An explicit difference between Joas and Hunt is that the former contends that the sacralization of the person is more fundamental than learning empathy. While both take inspiration from Durkheim’s concept of the sacred, Joas argues that it is crucial to acknowledge that empathy is an approach, capacity, or action that can be withheld, even though a person may well have the capacity. Only the motivation for empathy can prompt us to make the effort to understand, but we must always make this effort anew. So the de facto efficacy of empathy requires a personal motivation fuelled by substantive values. The sacralization of the person motivates us to show empathy; empathy alone does not engender the sacralization of the person, of all persons.26 Moreover, Joas questions the radical atheism of Durkheim’s notion that human rights constitute the ‘religion of modernity’, in which man is both believer and God. In chan­ ging terms from the Durkheimian sacralization of the individual to the sacralization of the person, Joas seeks to avoid atheist presuppositions, and simultaneously ensure that the intended belief in the irreducible dignity of every human being is not immediately mistaken for the unscrupulous, egocentric self-sacralization of the individual and the narcissistic inability to break away from self-referentiality.27 In normative terms, the narrative of continuity that positively connects the Age of Revo­ lutions and our own time implies that a critical horizon was opened during the late 18th century and remains open today. By logical extension, the deep genealogy holds that the critical power of the human rights project has not been exhausted. It thus not only puts up a clear defence of human rights, but also proposes explicitly or implicitly that human rights still remain an effective weapon in the hands of social movements, NGOs, inter­ national institutions, and governments. Revisionist genealogies The sources of the forerunners of the revisionists are more recent and direct. First, the revisionist’s claim resemble closely earlier French human rights critics such as Gauchet, who in 1980 stressed the different meanings of les droits de l’homme in moder­ nity and in late modern society. In the former, the political impact of rights was counter­ balanced and supported by the concomitant strengthening of the territorial state and political visions directing society toward the future. In late modernity, they tend to be mobilized in what Gauchet refers to as maximalist vindication of human rights, stressing the defence of the rights of individuals against the ‘power’ of the state, without being embedded in any historically anchored political imaginaries.28 24 Joas (n 13) 72-73. See, for example, Joas (n 13) 72–3, 185–90. Ibid. 60. 27 Ibid. 51. 28 Marcel Gauchet, ‘Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique’ (1980) Le Débat 3. Regarding the influence of Gauchet over Moyn, see: Tomas Wedin, ‘On the French Origins of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia’ (2023) Global 25 26 8 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN Second, at least two influential accounts critical of the ahistorical metaphysics on the historiography of human rights were published in the late 1990s and early 2000s, years before Moyn’s The Last Utopia (2010).29 Jan Eckel has written that the historian Cmiel turned against human rights accounts that were ‘evidently working at “inventing tra­ ditions” in an attempt to provide a longstanding backstory for the boom they were then experiencing, which they understood in optimistic terms.’30 In contrast to certain celebratory human rights accounts published at the time, Cmiel pointed to a neartotal lack of more concrete histories of human rights in the 1990s, when ‘you couldn’t escape’ the term.31 He called for historicizing analyses of the contemporary human rights movement, which, in spite of its long intellectual pedigree, ‘only took off in the 1970s’.32 Moreover, Cmiel stressed the arrival of private organizations and social move­ ments founded in order to reshape global practices, as well as the exclusive focus on indi­ vidual rights over and against state authority as defining features of the recent history of human rights.33 Cmiel’s two essays are often cited as an important—or the most impor­ tant—source of the historical turn to come.34 Another predecessor to the revisionists is the historian Afshari, who, the same year that Hunt presented her deep genealogy, invoked an argument about an ‘epistemological break’ in the early 20th century that disconnected contemporary human rights from older rights traditions.35 While Hunt attempted to explain the socio-cultural precondi­ tions of an 18th-century breakthrough for human rights, Afshari was more interested in delineating what characteristics make contemporary human rights different from earlier versions of rights. Without referring to Cmiel, Afshari took the next step in what would later be termed the ‘new historiography’.36 Afshari argued that teleological human rights histories, such as that of Lauren in The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (1998), fail to explain why ‘it took so long for these lofty ideals … to find institutional or Intellectual History; Tomas Wedin, ‘Samuel Moyn and Marcel Gauchet on the Relationship Between Human Rights, Neo­ liberalism, and Inequality’ (2023) Nordic Journal of Human Rights 41. Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Recent History of Human Rights’ (2004) The American Historical Review 109 1231–2. Also see Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States’ (1999) The Journal of American History 86; Reza Afshari, ‘On Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution of Inter­ national Human Rights: Visions Seen’ (2007) Human Rights Quarterly 29. 30 Jan Eckel, Ambivalence of Good (Oxford University Press 2014), 5. 31 Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Recent History of Human Rights’ (2004) The American Historical Review 109 1231–2. Also see Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States’ (1999) The Journal of American History 86 117, 119. 32 Ibid., 1233. 33 Ibid., 1231–2. 34 See, for example, Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde, ‘Introduction: Human Rights as History’, in The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford University Press 2012) 3; Pendas, ‘Toward a New Politics’, 95; Pamela Ballinger, ‘The History of Human Rights: The Big Bang of an Emerging Field or Flash in the Pan?’ (2012) New Global Studies 6 6. 35 While the two 2007 publications of Hunt and Afshari were decisive for the first phase of the historical turn, they were not the first. Alongside the essays of Cmiel, Hunt had published several essays and articles on ‘revolutionary rights’ during the preceding 10 years. See, for example, Lynn Hunt, ‘The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights’, in Lynn Hunt (ed) The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Bedford Series in History and Culture 1996). On Afshari’s notion of an ‘epistemological break’, see Afshari (n 31) 42. For accounts that trace the emer­ gence of the historical turn to the publications of Hunt and Afshari, see Roland Burke, ‘”How Time Flies”’: Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s’ (2015) The International History Review 394; Steven B. Jensen, ‘Black Box of Human Rights’ (2019) Human Rights Quarterly 41 200, 203. 36 Important differences between Cmiel and Afshari include that the former stresses the 1970s more than the latter, who, with the concept of an epistemological break in the 1930s, instead introduces a stricter notion of rupture than the former. 29 NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 9 broad normative expressions in societies where they germinated’, and that a linear, evol­ utionary narrative may ‘not fully appreciate the truly unique and revolutionary notion of the contemporary human rights.’37 Afshari posits that the crucial defining characteristic of contemporary human rights is that they are indivisible and interconnected; ‘singlecause’ movements, such as the labour movement, the women’s movement, or the anticolonial movement, therefore fail to qualify as human rights movements in his account.38 By contrast, in the work of Hunt, Martinez, and Joas, these movements are key human rights cases. This is also why Afshari locates an epistemological break between two different rights traditions in the 1930s, when, he argues, a movement oriented towards the cause of indivisible and interconnected human rights, beyond single separate issues, emerged for the first time in history.39 Although Cmiel and Afshari took decisive steps towards a revisionist genealogy, it was Moyn who really established the genre as a research programme. His polemical The Last Utopia remains a major point of reference within the historical turn. Moyn took Cmiel’s and Afshari’s accounts further in two ways. His first important addition was his emphasis on the different roles played by the state in the two junctures. The evocation of the rights of man in the Age of Revolutions around 1800 reflected a constellation of rights, the indi­ vidual, and the state that was different and, in some respects, opposite to the notion of human rights that emerged on a broad scale in the late 20th century. Whereas the notion of rights of man, or les droits de l’homme, served to bring about a reconstruction of the state founded on some form of popular control—where the rights of the political subjects would be respected through the state’s authority—the late-modern ideal of human rights was articulated as a defence of the individual against the state.40 Variations of this idea reverberate throughout Moyn’s study, with formulations such as: ‘The true key to the broken history of rights, then, is the move from the politics of the state to the morality of the globe, which now defines contemporary aspirations’, and: even as a rightist international alliance coalesced in 1975 to destroy the revolutionary left, the infamous Operación Cóndor, crimes in the world alone did not provoke interest in human rights. Their new appeal depended here, too, on the failure of more maximal visions of political transformation and the opening of the avenue of moral criticism in a moment of political closure.41 The same goes for the symbolically important UDHR in 1948. ‘In real history’, Moyn writes, ‘human rights were peripheral to both wartime rhetoric and post-war reconstruc­ tion, not central to their outcome’.42 Nor did they play any crucial role in the decoloniza­ tion movement or more generally in the third world movements of the post-1945 period; 37 Afshari (n 29) 5. Ibid., 12, 28, 34, 45, 49, 57. 39 It was in the period between the two wars that individual struggles, striving for ‘particular justice […] seemed to have converged to prepare the ground for the emergence of contemporary human rights concepts and created in the civil society a significant legacy to be relied on by the next generation in the mid-1900s […] Something significant was taking place in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, when the League of Nations became a focus for international discussion about human rights. Lauren explains the valiant attempts to give rights to labor, protect the interests of religious and ethnic minorities, speak on behalf of colonized peoples, and advance the rights of women and children, all grounded in the clearly expressed premises of an interconnected human rights paradigm.’ Afshari (n 29) 40. 40 Moyn (n 1) 7. 41 Ibid., 43, 141. 42 Ibid., 7. 38 10 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN the chief motivating force was instead collective self-determination, independence from the two superpowers, and economic development.43 A second crucial way in which Moyn took Cmiel’s and Afshahari’s accounts further is his emphasis on comprehending their breakthrough from a wider political perspective, seeing them as a kind of ersatz version of the much more ambitious projects that in the modern period had inspired political action, such as socialism and the experiments of post-1945 welfare states. Moyn maintains that it was ‘only in the 1970s that a genuine social movement around human rights made its appearance, seizing the foreground by transcending official government institutions, especially international ones’.44 In the wake of disillusionment following the Cambodian Genocide of 1975–79 and problems perceived by Western observers in postcolonial states after the liberation struggles in the 1960s, the transnational ideal of human rights emerged as a moral minimum hoped for in a politically disenchanted world: The best general explanation for the origins of this social movement and common discourse around rights remains the collapse of other, prior utopias, both state-based and internation­ alist. These were belief systems that promised a free way of life, but led into bloody morass, or offered emancipation from empire and capital, but suddenly came to seem like dark tra­ gedies rather than bright hopes.45 Yet if human rights, emerging out of the vacuum created by the crumbling of the grand narratives which had inspired political movements for well over a century, were born as an ‘alternative to grand political missions—or even as a moral criticism of poli­ tics’, as a ‘minimalist utopia’,46 they were ‘forced, slowly but surely, to assume the very maximalism they triumphed by avoiding’.47 Turning to the developments of the revisionist genealogy in the wake of Moyn’s founding intervention, three variations stand out to us. Hoffmann, Moyn’s co-editor in the ongoing Cambridge University Press series ‘Human Rights in History’, radicalized his colleague’s claims by placing the rupture even later in time, singling out the 1990s as the definitive breakthrough of the new, ‘distinct version of human rights, pre-state and individual’.48 It was only now, rather than in the 1970s, Hoffmann contends, that the ‘new global morality of human rights’ was imposed as an ideal trumping the ‘rights of states’.49 We had now witnessed humanitarian interventions (for example, in the former Yugoslavia), and prosecutions of mass violence and genocide were being initiated.50 Sociologically, Hoffmann connects these new tides to the coming to power of the baby boomers and the student protest generation, namely figures such as Bill Clinton, and a little later Bernard Kouchner and Joschka Fischer. A second variation consists of those who broadly accept the outlines of the revisionist account, but object to what they see as a neglect of the more fine-tuned transformations 43 Ibid., 84–119. Ibid., 8. Ibid. 46 Ibid., 9, 120–21. 47 Ibid., 9. 48 Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’ (n 1). Hoffmann’s argumentation hereby ties in with Koskenniemi’s emphasis on an ‘ethical turn’ in both academia and international law and politics in the 1990s, in contrast to those, like Moyn, who have highlighted the 1970s as a breaking point rather than the 1990s. 49 Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’, 298. 50 Ibid., 291–6, 298. 44 45 NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 11 in the period between the UDHR of 1948 and the proclaimed breakthrough in the 1970s. An exemplar of this position is the historian Burke, who has argued that it is a mistake to consider the 1948–1970s period as an interregnum.51 On closer analysis, a fledging indi­ vidual-centred and liberal conceptualization of human rights remained at least as an aspirational ideal for anti-colonial liberals, the ‘adoptive parents’ of human rights in the first decades after 1948.52 Then, by and large as a consequence of the transformation of the anti-colonial wars in light of the challenge of state-building under conditions of massive poverty and the burden of creating a unifying institutional framework, the UDHR lost some of its most ardent and politically influential advocates, and left the remaining liberal-minded individuals who still believed in a consensual definition of human rights in a state of despair towards the end of the 1960s.53 For Burke then, the UDHR did not come into the world stillborn, as Moyn had suggested. ‘At a normative level’, Burke writes, ‘the philosophy of the UDHR, while attacked, abandoned, and obscured, still gave a passable impression of being alive, although very sickly, fifteen years after its adoption’.54 And it was on these fragile grounds—even more fragile towards the end of the 1960s —that the human rights move­ ment of the 1970s could build. Without denying the shift that took place in the 1970s, Burke states that it is crucial not to lose sight of how the strengthening movement of that time had ‘some discernible precedents upon which to build, some accumulated organization and institutional frame to inherit, and a proximate lineage of principles that had yet to fully disintegrate’.55 While accepting Moyn’s revisionism, the historian Eckel conscientiously explored earlier movements that Moyn had rushed through in The Last Utopia to show that the history of human rights must be understood as a ‘fractured and discontinuous process’.56 Through in-depth analyses of preceding movements, such as the International League of the Rights of Man (founded in 1942), Eckel argues that elements of the latemodern conceptualization figured in earlier usages, but with very limited ‘transformative effect’, characterized mainly by ‘creeping disenchantment’ with regard to practical out­ comes.57 Without completely denying the relevance of long-term continuities, Eckel con­ tends that the impact of short-term causes and ‘immediate triggers’ is of greater importance.58 In order to properly grasp the ambivalent role of human rights in inter­ national politics, it is crucial to comprehend what he refers to as their polycentric char­ acter, and that the impetus behind them in any period was a combination of wellmeaning idealism and brute self-interest, thereby attaching a ‘wide range of sometimes contradictory meanings to the term over the decades’.59 A third revisionist undercurrent is represented by the growing number of scholars arguing that the ‘new historians’ who emphasize the 1970s as the breakthrough decade overlook connections between the triumphant notions of human rights and the 51 Burke (n 35) 395. Ibid. Ibid., 406–13. 54 Ibid., 414. 55 Ibid. 56 Eckel (n 31) 8. 57 Ibid., 9, 99–108. 58 Ibid., 8. 59 Ibid., 10. 52 53 12 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN suspended attempts to create a new, decolonialized world order, as seen in, for example, the efforts to create a new international economic order (NIEO).60 The common ground among the new historians’ distinct approaches is the claim that the received understand­ ing of the 1970s as the moment of breakthrough for a transnational conceptualization of human rights is too focused on the West. By relocating the focal point, these scholars have raised some crucial issues. In highlighting the role played by states who had recently gained independence, such as Jamaica, Liberia, and Ghana, in the promotion of the individual as a subject of inter­ national law, and in linking international human rights law and humanitarian law, the historian Steven L. B. Jensen qualifies the central role played by Western-based NGOs during the breakthrough of the 1970s.61 In contrast to previous studies, Jensen claims that states such as Jamaica and Liberia, in their successful struggle for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), clearly paved the way for individual-based human rights.62 Lastly, the fact that the revisionists are united in their insistence on an epistemological break at some point in the 20th century implies that contemporary human rights are dis­ connected from the revolutionary rights of the 18th and 19th centuries. By extension, to the extent that the older rights traditions are ascribed any critical potential, they have nothing to do with 20th-century human rights but are counterposed to them through dis­ placement or tension. We see the first phase of the historical turn—defined by historical continuity and rupture—as demarcated by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and fantasies about the ‘end of history’. With socialism and the anti-colonial struggle for self-determination appearing as bygone organizing principles of equality and freedom, the 1990s saw flour­ ishing human rights policies and NGO activity around the world, accompanied by the publication of celebratory human rights monographs.63 It was in this context, in which human rights enjoyed near-hegemonic standing, that issues of origins, continuity, and discontinuity emerged. Around the turn of the millennium, however, the concept of human rights found some questionable bedfellows. By 2003 the human rights narrative had been mobilized in several military interven­ tions, most notably in Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003).64 In general, the human rights track record seemed dim towards the end of the bloody 20th century, as Cmiel suggested in 2012: ‘Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, the West Bank—take your pick’.65 Using 60 See: Antony Anghie, ‘Whose Utopia? Human Rights, Development, and the Third World’ (2013) Qui Parle: Critical Huma­ nities and Social Sciences, 22); Joseph R. Slaughter, ‘Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World’ (2018) Human Rights Quarterly 40; Steven L. B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge Univesity Press 2016); Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti, and Roland Burke, Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge University Press 2020); Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, International Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford University Press 2017); Robert Brier, ‘Beyond the Quest for a “Breakthrough”: Reflections on the Recent Historiography on Human Rights’ (2015) European History Yearbook 16; Catherine Baylin Duryea, ‘Mobilising Human Rights: The Origins of Human Rights’ (2022) Berkeley Journal of International Law 40. 61 Jensen (n 60) 158, 187, 192. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 Eckel (n 30) 5–6; Moyn (n 1) 5–6; Alston (n 4) 2043. 64 Eckel (n 30) 4–7; Mark Mazower, ‘The End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights: The Mid-Twentieth-Century Disjuncture’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed) Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press 2011) 29. 65 Cmiel (n 31) 118, 135. NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 13 human rights as the stated motivation for violating the principle of state sovereignty was now increasingly perceived as a sign of hegemony; human rights would now be recur­ rently depicted in terms of dominance. As noted, it is in this conjuncture that the the­ matic content of the first phase of the historical turn—the problems of historical origins, continuity, and discontinuity—becomes intelligible. Celebratory accounts of human rights that may have seemed plausible at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall had partly lost their appeal. If one maintains, as scholars like Hunt, Martinez, and Joas have done, that human rights have potential thanks to societal support and a specific logic, it is understandable to search for deeper historical roots to signal a way to the future. If, like Moyn, one main­ tains that the human rights movement replaced more ambitious political programmes, it makes sense to identify differences that cut off the contemporary concept from earlier traditions, so as to open up the future for other, more comprehensive political imagin­ aries. In this respect, the revisionist account points forward to the second phase of the historical turn. II. From Lingua Franca to Neoliberalism and Inequality Some five years after the financial crisis in 2007–08, continuing attention granted to decolonization notwithstanding, a thematic shift began to emerge in the margins of the historical turn.66 Marks published a series of articles relating the success of the neo­ liberal movement from the 1970s onwards to the success of the human rights move­ ment.67 Her ideas were later taken up by scholars interested in human rights and neoliberalism and distributive inequality.68 In the debate that emerged in the wake of Marks’ 2013 text ‘Four Human Rights Myths’, four conflicting arguments have been offered regarding the relationship between the human rights movement and neoliberal­ ism, positing that human rights ought to be seen as: (i) part of the neoliberalization of society; (ii) a fellow traveller or, even stronger, reinforcer and collaborator; (iii) a power­ less companion; or (iv) an opponent. 66 Meredith Terretta ‘Decolonizing International Law?: Rights Claims, Political Prisoners, and Political Refugees during French Cameroon’s Transition from Trust Territory to State’ (2022) Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 42. 67 In ‘Four Human Rights Myths’ (2013), Marks discerns three existing human rights myths and adds to these a fourth. The first is the critique articulated by Raz’s twofold objection to current advocates of human rights. The first, process-related difficulty with human rights, Raz claims, is that the possibilities for overseeing and enforcing human rights are at best unreliable and in some cases non-existent. His second objection is that much of what is said in their name is clearly biased in favour of ideas stemming from the West. For both these reasons, it is questionable whether it makes sense to speak of human rights. The second myth Marks points to is Moyn’s critique of deep genealogies. The third myth she refers to is inspired by Brown’s criticism of the alleged non-political ‘neutrality’ of human rights, and that the new understanding of human rights is politics with its advantages and drawbacks as any other competing claims of ideals, and that the claims of human rights must therefore be understood as a significant form of exercising power, and not just contesting it. The fourth myth, developed by Marks herself, is the myth that human rights violations take form in hidden spaces, or what she refers to as the myth of the ‘dangerous dark’. For Marks, human rights viola­ tions must be envisaged from within a broader, systemic-oriented point of view, conceptualized as intertwined with the wider economic and social environment in which they take place. See Marks (n 19). While single articles pointing in this direction had been published previously, it was only after the publication of Marks’ article that the debate took off. Two noteworthy exceptions are: Wendy Brown, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For” … Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism’ (2004) South Atlantic Quarterly 103; Slavoj Zizek (2005) “Against human rights” New Left Review 34. 68 See, for example, the preface to: Gerald L. Neuman (ed) Human Rights in a Time of Populism: Challenges and Responses (Cambridge University Press 2020). 14 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN The first, less common, approach comes from those who understand the neoliberali­ zation of society in strictly economistic terms, as first and foremost built on the idea of homo economicus, and argue that human rights is an effect of its logic.69 A second approach is provided by critics who assert that human rights have not just been a power­ less companion but can be directly connected to the emergence of the neoliberal order, although not reducible to a manifestation of neoliberalism.70 Scholars like Brown, Klein, Whyte and Slobodian state that the emergence of the neoliberal order has been under­ girded by the ‘morals of the market’, a depoliticizing authoritarian form of moralism that has sapped the possibilities for reproducing and creating collective subjectivities that could have served as counterforces to the neoliberal wave.71 A prime example is the Chilean regime under Augusto Pinochet. Both Whyte and Slobodian have identified how the vocabulary of human rights has been a crucial tenet in the argumentation of some of the most prominent members of what Mirowski and Plehwe have called the ‘neoliberal thought collective’.72 The third interpretation, the powerless companion thesis, was articulated by Moyn as an answer to critics arguing that the late-modern form of human rights and neoliberalism have strengthened each other.73 In Not Enough (2018), Moyn reiterated the argument from his 2014 article titled ‘A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neo­ liberalism’ to claim that human rights have followed in the footsteps of the rapid and thorough unfolding of the market logic in the transformation of society. They have had little if anything to offer against neoliberalism because they ‘simply have nothing to say about material inequality’.74 Instead, human rights movements, activists, and states striving to promote human rights across the globe have been preoccupied with state abuses and the goal of providing everyone with a material minimum. Further, by aiming solely at achieving a material baseline for the most destitute, they have ‘failed to respond to—or even recognize—neo­ liberalism’s obliteration of any constraints on inequality’.75 As Moyn puts it, the ‘age of 69 Costas Douzinas, ‘Seven Theses on Human Rights: (3) Neoliberal Capitalism & Voluntary Imperialism’ (2013) Critical Legal Thinking, 23 May http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/23/seven-theses-on-human-rights-3-neoliberal-capitalismvoluntary-imperialism. 70 For a critique of the limits of the Anglophone debate and its focus on inequality, neoliberalism, and human rights, see: Wedin (n 28). 71 Brown (n 67); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press 2018); Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso 2019), 200–1; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Knopf Canada 2007); Kate Nash, ‘The Cultural Politics of Human Rights and Neoliberalism’ (2019) Journal of Human Rights 18; Marcel Gauchet, L’avènement de la démocratie: le nouveau monde (Gallimard 2017); Hopgood (n 7) 95. 72 Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds) The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press 2009). 73 Samuel Moyn, ‘A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism’ (2014) Law & Contemporary Pro­ blems 77; Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2018). 74 Moyn (n 73) 216. 75 Ibid., 217. For a Marxist critique of the displacement thesis and the focus on redistribution instead of social relations, see Paul O’Connell, ‘Human Rights: Contesting the Displacement Thesis’ (2018) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 69; 19; Dimitrios Kivotidis, ‘Theses on the Relationship between Rights and Social Struggle’ (2019) Northern Ireland Legal Quar­ terly 70 407. Moyn stresses the difference between what in contemporary analytical philosophy is referred to as sufficientarianism and egalitarianism, that is, the distinction between prioritizing a floor above which everyone should be secured, and the more demanding ideal of equality, according to which equality is a desideratum valuing distributive equality as an end in and of itself, and not just as a means for alleviating destitution (as in the case of the sufficientarist conceptualization). The contemporary debate between sufficientarianism and egalitarians dates back to the 1980s, and more specifically to the publication of Dworkin’s article ‘What is Equality?’, which attempted to address the discussions on equality sparked by Rawls’ pathbreaking work in the preceding decade. In the NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 15 human rights has not been kind to full-fledged distributive justice, because it is also an age of the victory of the rich.’76 The apparent inability of the human rights project to counter rising levels of socioeconomic inequality has resulted in conclusions ranging from the dismissal of human rights as ineffective in themselves to suggestions as to how human rights movements ought to change tactics. Moyn argues that the hope of bringing about change to our current predicament by transforming the human rights movement is futile, because its foundation is a critique of the state vindicated by both NGOs and parties within existing states promoting a limited state. Historically, however, all attempts to create a society based on critical levels of sufficiency and equality have relied on a ‘strong state—built with interventionist capacities, funded by high taxes, and able to call forth the zeal of its people’.77 Thus we find that the problem of origins is critical to Moyn’s account—the origins of human rights as such, but also the genealogy of sufficiency and equality. Among scholars of the fourth position, those who view human rights as a counterforce to neoliberalism, Sikkink and Ishay stand out. They underscore the need to recognize present-day human rights movements as part of a broader continuum of progressive pol­ itical movements with deep historical roots.78 Human rights are conceptualized as a stronghold against neoconservatism and various forms of religious extremism as well as neoliberalism.79 These scholars critique their opponents for an inability to distinguish between the (beneficent) version of individualism that prioritizes individual well-being and the (detrimental) neoliberal variant of individualism, in which the individual is ‘a rational, self-maximizing actor in a model where self-interest provides the motivation for economic production’.80 To summarize, in the second phase of the historical turn, still in its formative years, the problems of inequality and neoliberalism have emerged as major focal points. It is worth nothing that several more or less alarmist defences of human rights have reap­ peared lately, according to which authoritarian and nationalist threats to human rights materialized out of thin air with the arrival of Donald Trump as US president and Brexit.81 Even so, the second phase ought to be seen in connection with the financial crisis of 2007–08, with its long shadow of rising inequality, contradictory political ten­ dencies, spanning anti-austerity programmes, authoritarian populism, and attacks on democracy.82 ensuing debates, a plethora of positions has emerged. Alongside those already mentioned, we might add luck egali­ tarians (such as Dworkin himself), telic and deontic egalitarians, and prioritarians, to mention just some of the most influential positions. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Resources’ (1981) Philosophy and Public Affairs 10; Ronald Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources’ (1981) Philosophy and Public Affairs 10. 76 Moyn (n 73) 2. 77 Ibid., 219. 78 Kathryn Sikkink, Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press 2017) 38. Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (University of California Press 2008) ix. 79 Ibid., ix. 80 Sikkink (n 78) 39. 81 For an academic example of analyses of the threat against human rights in the wake of Brexit and Trump in isolation from the economic conjuncture of the financial crisis, see, for example, the preface to Neuman (n 68). 82 Daniel Brinks, Julia Dehm, and Karin Engle, ‘Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality’ (2019) Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 10 364; Paul O’Connell, ‘Human Rights Futures’ in Kathryn McNeilly and Ben Warwick (eds) The Times and Temporalities of International Human Rights Law (Hart Publishing 2022). 16 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN Thus, we contend that the issues of human rights in relation to neoliberalism and inequality address problems that are thoroughly entrenched in the financial crisis, which of course could not be registered in early publications of the historical turn, in the first decade of the millennium. This is not to propose a theory of reflection, which reduces the different human rights accounts to their different conjunctures. Nor is it an assertion that each and every account of human rights and neoliberalism and inequal­ ity appeared as a direct response to the financial crisis, or outside of the history of move­ ments, ideological struggles, and academic trends. Nevertheless, we hold that without the context of the long moment of the financial crisis that we still inhabit, the thematic shifts in the historical turn would be less intelligible. III. History and Theory Thus far, we have demonstrated that new thematic issues now define the historical turn in human rights studies, and that whereas the first phase and the issue of origins chiefly emerged in the context of human rights hegemony and human rights translated into a political legitimation of aggressive war, the second phase most directly relates to the financial crisis and its aftermath, from 2007 until today. Yet to stop there would obscure the stakes involved in this shift. To begin with, the new themes of the second phase of the historical turn bear clear signs of the contentions about origins from the first phase. On the one hand, the revisio­ nist critique of deep genealogies is directly or indirectly accepted in most accounts on human rights and neoliberalism. In these accounts, a major element of the analysis is the symbiotic way in which the movements of neoliberalism and human rights con­ quered the world within the same timeframe.83 To be sure, an argument about the relation between two separate institutions, movements, or cultural complexes presup­ poses a conception of their differentia specifica as well as theoretical limits in space and time. By implication, the recent studies on the relation between human rights and neoliberalism would have been more complicated if the deep genealogy of human rights had been accepted. On the other hand, some revisionist accounts of inequality, neoliberalism, and human rights have once again taken recourse to the French Revolu­ tion as an elementary site for the emergence of the problematics of rights, equality, inequality, and redistribution, just as the deep genealogy proposed from the beginning.84 Considering the conceptual differences that already characterize the field, it is necess­ ary to take the historical-theoretical presuppositions of human rights studies seriously. At present, the historical turn is riven by oppositions determined by differences at the level of theory. New historical and empirical research will therefore, by necessity, add to existing interpretative lines of conflict, not least by the differences between the deep and the revisionist genealogies, which have also become involved as presuppositions for how one understands the connection between human rights, neoliberalism, and inequality. In offering direct and open arguments about history and theory, empirical research will instead be able to take what is best from each camp in order to 83 84 See, e.g., Whyte (n 71). The obvious example of this is Moyn’s study from 2018 (n 73). Most commonly, however, the account of neoliberalism and human rights are confined to the second half of the 20th century, see Whyte (n 71); Brown (n 67). NORDIC JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 17 produce meaningful knowledge that will add to our understanding of human rights, past, present, and future. Ultimately, although the problem of origins has largely been carried over into the second phase, we believe it necessary to manifestly relate the thematic issues of the second phase to those of the first. Otherwise, they will continue to latently condition various interventions. More importantly, the integration of the thematic issues of the first and second phases ought to be accomplished on the basis of a general theory that can grasp the connections between the Age of Revolutions and our own time—be it in terms of modernity, capitalism or any other conceptual domain.85 Without such an account, the historical turn will continue to be characterized by conceptual mismatches and what appears to be impasses between opposing interpretative parties. Our way of contextualizing the thought of Hunt and Moyn, as described above, already contains the seeds of such a recontextualization of the first and second phases of the historical turn. Hunt’s account rests on a historico-theoretical contrast between a society in which a right represented a natural privilege and a society in which rights at a principal level became equal among human beings. One could accept the notion of such a shift to naturalized equality while at the same time accepting Moyn’s analysis of how contemporary human rights have replaced the revolutionary tradition of the rights of man, in particular with regard to the different social ontologies on which the modern and late-modern forms are premised. The rights of man and human rights ought to be seen as different conceptions and traditions of rights rooted in the same his­ torical shift from privilege to equality. As such, the contemporary human rights move­ ment might be seen as at least more vulnerable in the face of neoliberalism and distributive inequality than the revolutionary rights tradition, which, in turn, is less con­ sistent in relation to the shift to universal equality owing to its open delimitations of rights according to national sovereignty. Also, as seen, for Hunt’s predecessors, the shift from natural inequality to natural equality at the level of rights unlocked not only a critical horizon against which exclusions from rights could be fought, but also the issue of the co-existence of social inequality and politico-legal equality. In that way, we are asked to unite the problem of origins of human rights with the problem of inequality.86 When striving to reunite the thematic issues of the first and second phases, one must avoid simple rejections and oppositions between the deep and the revisionist genealogies, and instead acknowledge that, despite each having its critics, neither has so far proposed continuity and rupture in absolute terms. In this setting, it will be important to acknowl­ edge that times have changed, and we can no longer take for granted the esteemed status that human rights once enjoyed. This is not to propose that the critique of the critique of human rights is automatically warranted; only that the major interventions in the histori­ cal turn appear to have taken human rights for granted, and that such a conception of natural progress is absolutely unwarranted. 85 86 For an analysis of different ways of historicizing human rights, see: Wedin (n 6). For a theoretical suggestion along those lines, see: Carl Wilén, Interpreting the Haitian Revolution: From the Rights of Man to Human Rights (Gothenburg University Press 2022). 18 T. WEDIN AND C. WILÉN IV. Conclusion In this article, we have demonstrated that the historical turn in human rights studies is divided into two phases. The first phase was defined by a focus on origins, continuity, and discontinuity; the second phase is defined by a focus on neoliberalism and inequality. In our analysis of each phase, we have tried to offer a view that is both deeper and richer than previous accounts. We have also revealed that the thematic content that dis­ tinguishes the two phases can largely be understood as responses to two different econ­ omic, political, and ideological conjunctures. Whereas the first phase emerged in the context of human rights hegemony and human rights translated into a political legitima­ tion of aggressive war, the second phase relates to the long moment of the financial crisis since 2007. Most importantly, we have not only demonstrated that actual historico-theor­ etical continuities exist between the first and second phases, but also that a history of the relation between human rights and neoliberalism presupposes that we address the issue of origins from the very beginning. Ultimately, our way of historizing the historical turn in human rights studies demonstrates that its conceptual mismatches and seeming impasses can only be superseded based on a general theory that can grasp the connec­ tions between the Age of Revolutions and our own time, whether in terms of modernity, capitalism, or any other conceptual framework. Articulating the specifics of such a sol­ ution must be the task of future research.