Book Review

Comparative/World

This is an excellent collection on an important topic. The contributions cover an admirably diverse set of times and places. The volume is not tightly unified, but most of the essays speak to at least one other and are good enough to stand alone if necessary.	1
David Zaret, Michael Zuckert, and coeditor Lynn Hunt trace the emergence of an idea of human rights through the English, American, and French Revolutions. Zaret emphasizes that most rights claimed in the English Revolution—by Parliament and its enemies—were grounded in appeals to English liberties, not universal human entitlements, and to tradition rather than reason. Moreover, most were rights for corporate bodies rather than individuals, and many were matters of procedure (e.g. for levying taxes) rather than of the ultimate ends of political or social life. But Zaret sees in the Levellers some of the distinctive ideas of modern human rights theories: rights that were claimed for individuals, derived by reason from human nature, and that went beyond guarantees of freedom from harm to embrace positive rights to political participation. Zuckert starts from a historiographical debate over whether the American colonists were guided by notions of natural law and human rights or were claiming their rights as "free-born Englishmen." The colonists were engaged in a transatlantic debate about the English constitution, he argues, but they read this "document" as they did because they saw it as a means for implementing natural rights. Hunt's wide-ranging essay on the French Revolution (which also serves as an introduction to the volume) roots the emergence of human rights in both a revolutionary political moment and the broader cultural movement of the Enlightenment. Hunt acknowledges the "traditional" origins of many of these rights, but she argues that the revolution was critical to reconceptualizing them as universal. She also emphasizes that despite some profound limitations, the revolutionary regimes often took this universalism quite seriously: granting full legal rights to Jews well before most American states, abolishing slavery in France's colonies, and emancipating adult children from the legal authority of their parents. Far from being a marginal issue, she argues, curbing excessive parental authority was central for the revolutionaries, and to modern ideas of human rights, as it was crucial to granting individual autonomy to each (male) adult.	2
Six more essays take up post-1870 venues in which various kinds of colonialism have accompanied the spread of Enlightenment ideas. Coeditor Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom's essay on China poses the common problem of these essays very usefully, arguing that, despite important and continuing arguments about what rights humans should have, the crucial historical question has more often been who counts as human. Thus, Wasserstrom notes, the sharp decline in the use of the category "non-person" in China since the 1970s constitutes an important step toward a regime more respectful of human rights, despite continuing abuses. He also argues that while references by Beijing's defenders to discrimination against Chinese in pre-1949 treaty ports (epitomized by the probably apocryphal "no dogs or Chinese allowed" park entrance sign) cannot excuse post-1949 abuses, they are worth exploring. They show how Westerners have often undermined the appeal of Enlightenment values that they then complain others have failed to "learn," and how certain post-Enlightenment currents, including Social Darwinism and Leninism, have "taught" new ways to exclude people from the Enlightenment's universalist promises.	. . .