070051 GR Guided Reading (2016W)

The history, the historians and the human rights
(guided reading, winter semester 2016-2017, University of Vienna)
The seminar is an introduction to the different historical meanings of the concept “human rights” but also to the contemporary debates concerning the progress of humanism and the political interpretations and uses of the idea for universal human rights. Before focusing on the evolution of the syntagm “human rights”, the seminar starts with a short analysis of the evolution of the idea of “natural rights”.
The seminar aims to analyze the of some the classical declarations related to the human rights as well as the context of their appearance: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution (1791), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) etc.
A special attention will be paid to the interwar period: the creation and the activity of the League of Nations, the role of the French League for Human rights in national and international politics as well as that of the International Federation for Human Rights, the organization uniting the different national Leagues for Human Rights. In the context after the so called “Versailles treaties” the theme of the minority rights appears to be one of the main issues in European politics. Not less important is the debate about the defense of the rights of communists in the context of Comintern propaganda and the subsequent reactions and overreactions of national-state governments.
The human rights as a theoretical and ideological instrument during the Cold War are another topic that will be discussed during the seminar. How the communist countries did they talk about the human rights and is the articulation of the history of the different oppositions to the communist regimes (Hungary 1956, Prague 1968) in the language of the human rights legitimate?
Crucial for the understanding of the historical metamorphoses of the human rights since the Enlightenment till their contemporary global interpretation are Samuel Moyns’ The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and Human Rights and the Uses of History (as well as some of its critics, like for instance Robin Blackburn’s “Reclaiming human rights”). Michael Ignatieff’s defense of “humanitarian interventions” and the theoretical vision of Nicolas Guilhot (“The Democracy Makers. Human Rights and the politics of global order”) that human rights have been transformed from “weapons for critique of power” in the “main language of global power” will be used as a starting point to analyze the actual “export of democracy and of human rights”.
Last but not least, the seminar will focus on some of the best known liberal, utilitarian and Marxist critics to the concept of human rights.