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Stanford Studies in Human Rights
Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey
This remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders―including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg―engaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrary presents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today's human rights debates. Since its adoption in 1948, historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was influenced by UNESCO's 1947–48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, that supposedly demonstrated a truly universal consensus on human rights. Based on meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contrary provides a curated history of the UNESCO human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights. In collecting, annotating, and analyzing these responses, including letters and responses that were omitted and polite refusals to respond, Mark Goodale shows that the UNESCO human rights survey was much less than supposed, but also much more. In many ways, the intellectual struggles, moral questions, and ideological doubts among the different participants who both organized and responded to the survey reveal a strikingly critical and contemporary orientation, raising similar questions at the center of current debates surrounding human rights scholarship and practice. This volume contains letters and survey responses from Jacques Havet, Jacques Maritain, Arnold J. Lien, Richard P. Mckeon, Quincy Wright, Levi Carneiro, Arthur H. Compton, Charles E. Merriam, Lewis Mumford, E. H. Carr, John Lewis, Harold J. Laski, Serge Hessen, John Somerville, Boris Tchechko, Luc Somerhausen, Hyman Levy, Ture Nerman, R. Palme Dutt, Maurice Dobb, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Marcel De Corte, Pedro Troncoso Sánchez, Mahatma Gandhi, Chung-Shu Lo, Kurt Riezler, Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, Hubert Frère, M. Nicolay, W. Albert Noyes, Jr., Aldous Huxley, Ralph W. Gerard, Johannes M. Burgers, Humayun Kabir, A. P. Elkin, S. V. Puntambekar, Leonard Barnes, Benedetto Croce, Jean Haesart, F. S. C. Northrop, Peter Skov, Emmanuel Mounier, Maurice Webb, John Macmurray, Julius Moór, L. Horváth, Alfred Weber, Don Salvador De Madariaga, Frank R. Scott, Jawaharlal Nehru, Margery Fry, Isaac Leon Kandel, René Maheu, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Morris L. Ernst, Arnold Schoenberg, W. H. Auden, Melville Herskovits, Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, Ernest Henry Burgmann, Herbert Read, and T. S. Eliot.
376 pages, Paperback
Published April 24, 2018
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 20, 2018
René Maheu's reply is most relevant to our times as it deals with the right to information and the right to the expression of opinion :
'Whether it be the press, news agencies, the cinema or broadcasting, information today is only to a limited degree an expression of opinion. It either precedes or follows opinion. Moreover that opinion is the opinion of the public and not of news operators, whose task it is in most cases to suppress their personal views. It is a question of mass opinion, and mass behaviour; the techniques of modern news belong to the field of mass psycho-sociology, and not of individual psychology. The conditioning or exploitation of mass opinion and mass behaviour is today a major industry, whose operation is only to a minor degree affected by the individual views and reactions of its producers and even consumers.
Neither ethics nor politics can disregard this formidable mechanism. The task is to humanize it.'
Maheu believes this is 'one of the major problems of this age and if we are to prevent what too often occurs, the large scale alienation of the masses, the same revolution must be achieved as regards information in this century as took place in education in the last century. Information must be a right (hence, too, a duty) and that right must belong to those whose thought is at stake.'
Something we tend to forget in the comfort of our filter bubbles.
#####
Albert Szent-Györgyi*, discoverer of Vitamin C which earned him a Nobel Prize in Medicine, offers a profound meditation on freedom of thought for children: 'It is, in my opinion, a sign of respect for an absolutely essential freedom not to create in children, at an age when they are defenseless, any conditioned reflex (psychological or otherwise) that they would subsequently be incapable of making disappear.'
*Albert's education was interrupted by the First World War, during which he used his detailed knowledge of human anatomy to himself in his own arm with relative safety, in order to be released from active duty. In 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland, he donated his Nobel medal (206 grams of 23-carat gold) to support Hungarian volunteers fighting in the short-lived Winter War.
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In his answer to the survey, Jean Haesaert writes about how, 'on the occasion of each fresh social change, the new masters have advanced their own ideals by clothing them with the name of rights. This procedure reduces the charter to the level of a program, or even of an electoral platform; it becomes no more than a catalogue of claims , ill assorted and impassioned; additions or deletions are made as feeling dictates.'
He follows this up with an amusing historical overview, stream-of-consciousness style: 'The constitution of 1789 mentions, in somewhat of a jumble, liberty, equality, property, security, resistance against oppression, the right to take part in drawing up laws and to occupy public positions, individual freedom, freedom of opinion, and the right to fix, vote and control taxation. The Constitution of 23 June 1793, more social in character, adds not the right of assembly, but freedom of work, culture, and trade, the right to public assistance and the right of petition. The Belgian Constitution, which had the benefit of considerable recent experience and approached the matter more soberly, suppressed the right of resistance to oppression, circumscribed the right to petition and introduced the inviolability of domicile, the free uses of languages, the inviolability of correspondence and the right of association. The 1947 Declaration incorporated the principles of 1789 as a whole and frenziedly added, with a stroke of the pen, the right of asylum, the right to work, the right to trades union activity, the right to strike, the right to the collective fixing of working conditions, the right to the management of enterprises and to the nationalization of the most important of them, the right to the development of the individual and the family, and the right to health, material security, rest, recreation and culture. It then surpassed itself by guaranteeing the same rights to all men and women in the French Union. At which the lawyer, the economist and the sociologist are left breathless and aghast.'
From a criticism of natural law theories and abstract conceptions of law more generally, Haessaert described the interest in natural law (and perhaps human rights) as a 'temporary disease'. No wonder he emphasises that there can only be rights when they are accompanied by corresponding duties.
Or to paraphrase Rousseau, man must be disciplined to enjoy the freedoms which are his rights. Education for the various freedoms demands discipline.
'Whether it be the press, news agencies, the cinema or broadcasting, information today is only to a limited degree an expression of opinion. It either precedes or follows opinion. Moreover that opinion is the opinion of the public and not of news operators, whose task it is in most cases to suppress their personal views. It is a question of mass opinion, and mass behaviour; the techniques of modern news belong to the field of mass psycho-sociology, and not of individual psychology. The conditioning or exploitation of mass opinion and mass behaviour is today a major industry, whose operation is only to a minor degree affected by the individual views and reactions of its producers and even consumers.
Neither ethics nor politics can disregard this formidable mechanism. The task is to humanize it.'
Maheu believes this is 'one of the major problems of this age and if we are to prevent what too often occurs, the large scale alienation of the masses, the same revolution must be achieved as regards information in this century as took place in education in the last century. Information must be a right (hence, too, a duty) and that right must belong to those whose thought is at stake.'
Something we tend to forget in the comfort of our filter bubbles.
#####
Albert Szent-Györgyi*, discoverer of Vitamin C which earned him a Nobel Prize in Medicine, offers a profound meditation on freedom of thought for children: 'It is, in my opinion, a sign of respect for an absolutely essential freedom not to create in children, at an age when they are defenseless, any conditioned reflex (psychological or otherwise) that they would subsequently be incapable of making disappear.'
*Albert's education was interrupted by the First World War, during which he used his detailed knowledge of human anatomy to himself in his own arm with relative safety, in order to be released from active duty. In 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland, he donated his Nobel medal (206 grams of 23-carat gold) to support Hungarian volunteers fighting in the short-lived Winter War.
####
In his answer to the survey, Jean Haesaert writes about how, 'on the occasion of each fresh social change, the new masters have advanced their own ideals by clothing them with the name of rights. This procedure reduces the charter to the level of a program, or even of an electoral platform; it becomes no more than a catalogue of claims , ill assorted and impassioned; additions or deletions are made as feeling dictates.'
He follows this up with an amusing historical overview, stream-of-consciousness style: 'The constitution of 1789 mentions, in somewhat of a jumble, liberty, equality, property, security, resistance against oppression, the right to take part in drawing up laws and to occupy public positions, individual freedom, freedom of opinion, and the right to fix, vote and control taxation. The Constitution of 23 June 1793, more social in character, adds not the right of assembly, but freedom of work, culture, and trade, the right to public assistance and the right of petition. The Belgian Constitution, which had the benefit of considerable recent experience and approached the matter more soberly, suppressed the right of resistance to oppression, circumscribed the right to petition and introduced the inviolability of domicile, the free uses of languages, the inviolability of correspondence and the right of association. The 1947 Declaration incorporated the principles of 1789 as a whole and frenziedly added, with a stroke of the pen, the right of asylum, the right to work, the right to trades union activity, the right to strike, the right to the collective fixing of working conditions, the right to the management of enterprises and to the nationalization of the most important of them, the right to the development of the individual and the family, and the right to health, material security, rest, recreation and culture. It then surpassed itself by guaranteeing the same rights to all men and women in the French Union. At which the lawyer, the economist and the sociologist are left breathless and aghast.'
From a criticism of natural law theories and abstract conceptions of law more generally, Haessaert described the interest in natural law (and perhaps human rights) as a 'temporary disease'. No wonder he emphasises that there can only be rights when they are accompanied by corresponding duties.
Or to paraphrase Rousseau, man must be disciplined to enjoy the freedoms which are his rights. Education for the various freedoms demands discipline.
Displaying 1 of 1 review