The Myth of Universality: The UNESCO “Philosophers’ Committee” and the Making of Human Rights

Abstract

This article reexamines one of the most enduring questions in the history of human rights: the question of human rights universality. By the end of the first decade after the end of the Cold War, debates around the legitimacy and origins of human rights took on new urgency, as human rights emerged as an increasingly influential rubric in international law, transnational development policy, social activism, and ethical discourse. At stake in these debates was the fundamental status of human rights. Based in part on new archival research, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the rediscovery by scholars in the late 1990s of a 1947 UNESCO survey that purported to demonstrate the universality of human rights through empirical evidence. The article argues that this contested intellectual history reflects the enduring importance of the “myth of universality”—a key cultural narrative that we continue to use to find meaning across the long, dark night of history.

The Paradox of Justice: From Transitional to Everyday Justice

“…In sociology, where it has flourished (Lefebvre and Levich 1987;Highmore 2001;Jones 2018), everydayness was seen in the early part of the twentieth century as an alternative to the discipline's core debate over positivism versus critical sociology, between which there was relatively little room for scholarly inquiry or innovation (Adler, Adler, and Fontana 1987). Sociologists interested in the micro, in the presentation of self, and in the relationship between individuals and structures drew on the notion of the everyday to develop new approaches, including symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1986), dramaturgy (Goffman 2021), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1991), and phenomenological sociology (Berger and Luckmann 1967), which in turn gave way to more contemporary variations of "everyday life sociology" like the sociology of emotions and conversation analysis.…”

“…Yet there is growing recognition in the policy and practitioner communities that there are limitations to the existing approaches to justice and a wide range of approaches to measurement related to transitions from conflict and authoritarianism (Merry and Wood 2015; Schaffer 2015; Merry 2016; Goodale 2018). Much scientific and practitioner energy has been devoted to developing bottom-up and community-sourced methodologies in peacebuilding, stabilization, and humanitarian contexts (Khan and Nyborg 2013).…”

Justice in the Vernacular: An Anthropological Critique of Commensuration

“…Without a belief in the ultimate commensurability of a concept like “justice” (leaving questions of language aside), how else could the entire edifice of international law be justified, from the United Nations (UN) system of human rights treaty monitoring and enforcement to the International Criminal Court? Without an unwavering and even righteous adherence to what I have called elsewhere the “myth of universality” (Goodale 2018a), what remains of human rights and international justice, their global normative legitimacy, the carefully curated narrative of their inevitable ascendance? Yet, as the illustrative sampling from the anthropological literature has shown us, “justice” is actually not commensurable in the ways on which the various systems of international law depend, an ethnographic and historical fact that is, among other things, devastating to the wider liberal legal project and the various teleologies—such as the “justice cascade” (Sikkink 2011)—through which it is, in part, expressed.…”

O fundacionalismo filosófico em direitos humanos

“…Em 1946, a Comissão de Direitos Humanos da ONU determinou à Seção de Estudos de Filosofia e Humanística (SEFH) da UNESCO a elaboração de uma conferência internacional para debater os princípios que deveriam fundamentar uma declaração moderna dos direitos do homem (GLENDON, 2002;GOODALE, 2017). Embora a Comissão da ONU fosse composta por juristas e filósofos experientes, como John Humphrey e René Cassin, à frente desse trabalho pela UNESCO estavam o jovem intelectual francês Jacques Havet, então com apenas 27 anos de idade, diretor da SEFH, e o diretor geral da agência, o britânico Julien Huxley.…”