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Christian Human Rights (Intellectual History of the Modern Age) Hardcover – August 17, 2015

by Samuel Moyn (Author)

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In Christian Human Rights, Samuel Moyn asserts that the rise of human rights after World War II was prefigured and inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person that first arose in Christian churches and religious thought in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war. The Roman Catholic Church and transatlantic Protestant circles dominated the public discussion of the new principles in what became the last European golden age for the Christian faith. At the same time, West European governments after World War II, particularly in the ascendant Christian Democratic parties, became more tolerant of public expressions of religious piety. Human rights rose to public prominence in the space opened up by these dual developments of the early Cold War.

Moyn argues that human dignity became central to Christian political discourse as early as 1937. Pius XII's wartime Christmas addresses announced the basic idea of universal human rights as a principle of world, and not merely state, order. By focusing on the 1930s and 1940s, Moyn demonstrates how the language of human rights was separated from the secular heritage of the French Revolution and put to use by postwar democracies governed by Christian parties, which reinvented them to impose moral constraints on individuals, support conservative family structures, and preserve existing social hierarchies. The book ends with a provocative chapter that traces contemporary European struggles to assimilate Muslim immigrants to the continent's legacy of Christian human rights.

Christian Human Rights (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

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Product Details

Series: Intellectual History of the Modern Age
Hardcover: 264 pages
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (August 17, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 081224818X
ISBN-13: 978-0812248180
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #261,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #206 in Books > Law > Constitutional Law > Human Rights
- #368 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Human Rights
- #572 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Civil Rights & Liberties

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A necessary provocation

By Ronald Osborn on September 22, 2015

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Christian Human Rights, is at once immensely informative, provocative, and exasperating. I found myself disagreeing with him on critical points on nearly every page but being forced to think and rethink why. I gave this book four stars not because I agree with his central thesis but because I think his book is a necessary provocation that will stimulate valuable debate and sharpen the arguments of those of us who are committed to excavating the sources of human rights and humanistic values in much earlier texts and lives than Moyn thinks should be admitted in the discussion.

In Moyn's telling, it was only in the 1930s and 1940s that Christians for the first time embraced the vocabulary of “human rights” in any significant way, and they did so not in defense of individual freedoms or rights as we now think of them but as an essentially conservative reaction to the threats of individualistic liberalism on the one hand and atheistic communism on the other. During World War II and in the immediate post-war period, Moyn persuasively argues, “human rights” talk represented not a progressive political movement but a retrenchment of bourgeois values in the name of saving European Christian civilization from the perils of secular modernity. Whatever “percolations” came before this period, he less convincingly insists, are too murky, diffuse, and inconsequential to be credited in any meaningful way for the birth of human rights. Scholars who argue otherwise, Moyn writes, can only be engaged in a “fictitious” and selective teleological reading of history that does violence to the alterity of the past.Read more ›

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Samuel Moyn and Christian Human Rights

By Jazz It Up Baby on November 6, 2015

Format: Hardcover

As David Gordon stated in Mises.org on November 2015, Samuel Moyn could take for his own Lord Acton’s remark that “few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.” Moyn, a distinguished intellectual historian, has in several books argued that appeals to human rights in recent times reflect particular political and social contexts. He does not reduce the ideas of rights and dignity to these contexts, but his work tends to stress events rather than the inner logic of ideas.[1]In Christian Human Rights, he maintains that the Roman Catholic Church, beginning in the late 1930s, abandoned its former opposition to the language of individual human rights. Instead, most prominently in the wartime allocutions of Pope Pius XII, human dignity and rights were now the order of the day. Protestant church groups and writers paralleled the new trend, culminating in the rise and prominence of Christian Democratic parties in the post-World War II period.

Moyn states the key argument of the book in this way: “’Human rights’ came to figure because, in the crucible of reaction before and during World War II when they flirted with authoritarian states. . . Christians learned that the cultivation of moral constraint depended on keeping the spiritual communities that offered their vision of ethical life a home partly free of the state.” (p.11)

Moyn does not view with complete favor the Christian embrace of human rights. “All things considered, the framework that human dignity provided human rights and liberal constitutionalism in and through the war is hard to greet as an uncomplicated breakthrough---if it was not a retrograde concession.Read more ›

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