NOTE – THE SYLLABUS MAY WELL UNDERGO SOME MODIFICATION AFTER
OUR INITIAL MEETINGS
NEJS 141B – HUMAN RIGHTS: LAW, POLITICS, THEOLOGY
Spring 2016
Instructor: Yehudah Mirsky
Office hours: Wed, 11-12, or by appointment, Mandel 318
mirsky@brandeis.edu
Teaching Fellow: Iddo Haklai
idfeldne@brandeis.edu
Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Genesis 4:9)
One should not treat Cain’s response as a mockery of God, or as a
response of a little boy: ‘This is not me, this is him.’ Cain’s response is
sincere. Only the ethical is absent there; the answer is solely from
ontology; I am I and he is he. We are beings ontologically separate.
(Emmanuel Levinas)
After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda,
a Canadian forces padre [chaplain] asked me how, after all I had seen
and experiences, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there
is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. (Romeo
Dallaire)
Learning Goals: In this course we will try – through a mix of reading,
lecture, classroom discussion and a lively forum on our Latte page, to
acquire a meaningful acquaintance with much of the contemporary
work that proceeds under the rubric of human rights, gain some
understanding of how this enterprise arose over the last centuries to
the present, and try to think critically about some of its underlying
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tendencies and assumptions. Methodologically we will try to
coordinate readings in history, philosophy, theology, politics and law,
bringing them into mutually supportive focus that will yield a clearer
picture of this very important and regularly misunderstood enterprise.
“Human rights” has in many ways become in many ways the lingua
franca of our time. An ever-expanding panoply of treaties,
governmental, non-governmental, and a large alphabet soup of
official and unofficial international organizations are devoted to
promoting human rights across the globe, and an army of academics
trails alongside. Yet some fundamental ambiguities and questions
abide: why did this enterprise, which claims to speak in the name of
timeless truth, arise only in recent history, perhaps only in recent
decades? What are its conceptual foundations? How does it relate to
other forms of politics and policy? Can it speak in the terms of
religious traditions with roots much older than modernity? Is it its
own kind of religious belief? Is “human rights” really the best word for
all the activities – advocacy, international law, democracy building,
humanitarianism – that are undertaken under its umbrella? And has it
at all succeeded where it counts, in alleviating man-made ,regime
driven human suffering?
These are huge questions, and in the course of a single semester all
we can do is scratch the surface and begin to explore some avenues
of inquiry. But you have to start somewhere.
We will begin with a survey of the range of human rights institutions
and actors at work in the world today. We will then take a step back
and try to develop an historical picture of how all of this came to be.
We start in the present before moving back to the past in order to
keep asking ourselves just what are the roots of the human rights
framework as we know it today and if it could have developed in other
directions. We will pay special attention to the role of Jewish
historical experience in the fostering of human rights, and to some of
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the basic human rights questions attending the creation and
development of the State of Israel.
With our historical and contemporary surveys in hand we can turn to
the philosophical –and perhaps theological – underpinnings of human
rights theory and practice today. First, we will look at two, powerful
and different, philosophical justifications for the enterprise. Then, we
will turn to one specific religious tradition, namely Judaism, and
explore a range of efforts by different thinkers to relate human rights
discourse to Jewish thought and practice.
Finally, we will return to the present, and examine a number of
contemporary issues in light of all we have read and discussed, and
see if we can come up with some workable understandings of human
rights in our time.
The syllabus may be modified in the course of the semester as we
move together through reading and discussion.
A word or two about our work together: All of us learn by listening,
by discussion, by reflection and by action. Classrooms are one kind of
space for learning and getting the most out of them, making them
most congenial to shared learning is an ongoing challenge. To that
end, I ask that you not bring your laptops to class. We will designate a
rotation for note-taking by laptop so that we will have a set of
electronic notes, which will be posted on the Supplementary materials
section of Latte. You will also find there an essay by a leading scholar
of social media discussing why he chooses not to have laptops and
other devices in his classroom. I genuinely believe that this will help us
foster a shared space for attention and improve our class’ sense of
community. If this poses real difficulty for you please feel free to talk
to me about it.
And speaking of classroom community, I want to meet individually
with each of you in the first weeks of the semester, during my office
hours or at another mutually convenient time, to get a sense of you
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and your interests (even if we have met and spoken before). In my
experience, this helps make both class work and written assignments
and exams much easier all the way around.
Your grade will consist of:
40% -ongoing classroom participation, including posting brief, but
regular comments submitted to me by 9 am on the mornings of our
meetings,.
30% - midterm take-home essay
40% - a take-home, final exam essay.
I anticipate that as a four credit course, you will have to do about 9
hours of reading and preparation per week, classroom time aside.
Please be advised that I discourage the use of laptops in class, the
better to foster our own shared attentiveness to one another and to
the subject at hand. I am of course open to accommodations, and our
TF will be keeping electronic notes which I will post on Latte.
For fuller discussion, see this very helpful essay
https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-puttheir-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368
Needless to say, any written work submitted must be your own. When
relevant, I expect proper citation form. It’s not a punishment – it’s
that which enables your readers to discover your sources and better
understand your interpretation.
Required Texts:
Michael Goodhart, ed. Human Rights: Politics and Practice, 2d edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) [hereinafter Goodhart]
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton,
2007)
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) [hereinafter Hoffman]
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Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human
Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2013)
Jacquelin A. Laing & Russell Wilcox, eds, The Natural Law Reader
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) [hereinafter NLR]
Alan Mittleman, A Short History of Jewish Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2012)
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard
University Press, 2010)
For the Final Exam:
Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University
Press, 2013)
UNIT ONE: CONTEMPORARY SURVEY
This unit will offer a tour d’horizon of contemporary human rights
institutions and practices.
Week One
Philip Gourevitch, “Mass Murder Begins with People like Us: An
interview with Thierry Cruvellier” New Yorker, May 15, 2014
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mass-murder-relieson-people-like-us-an-interview-with-thierry-cruvellier
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 1-44, 401-414
Week Two
Goodhart, Introduction
Basic documents: UDHR, ICCPR, ICESR, Genocide Convention, Vienna
Final Document
Mission Statements of Amnesty International,, Freedom House, Open
Society Institutes Human Rights Watch
US State Department, Country Reports for Human Rights Practices
2014, Overview and Introduction
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US State Department, Advancing Freedom and Democracy Report,
2014
Chapter 4, “Human Rights in International Law”
Chapter 5, “Human Rights in Comparative Politics”
Chapter 18, “Torture”
As you read these chapters – and others from Goodhart in the course
of the semester – pay careful attention to how the various articles
navigate the line between describing human rights ideas, practices
and institutions, and advocating for them.
UNIT TWO: HISTORY, ORIGINS, GENEALOGIES
These introductory readings discuss the creation of modern politics in
the Protestant Reformation, and complicate conventionally neat
understandings of religion and secularism. We will move through the
modern period to the emergence of human rights in the postwar
years and its flourishing in the 1970s and 80s. We will also begin to
train a focused look at Jewish historical experience.
Week Three
Greenberg, ‘Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law”
Mittleman, Chapters 1-2
In NLRF: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Philo, Gospel of John, Augustine
Mittleman, Chapters 3-4
Altmann, “Saadya’s Conception of the Law”
Maimonides, selections
In NLRF, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau.
Week Four
Kant (“perpetual peace” “what is enlightenment?)
Rousseau, Social Contract, Book I, chapters 1,2,6,7,8
Haakonen, “Natural Law” from Routledge Encyclopedia of Ethics
Charles Taylor, “Western Secularism,” in Craig Calhoun, ed. Rethinking
Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011)
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Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State and Self (Basic Books,
2012), Chapter 1,
Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”
Duncan Bell, “What is Liberalism”
Week Five
Gauchet, “Rights of Man,” from Dictionary of the French Revolution
Mary Wollstonecraft
Selections from Burke Reflections (his distinction between American
and French Revolutions) and Paine’s Rights of Man
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2008)
David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford University
Press, 1984), part 3 ("Abolishing Slavery and Civilizing the World"), pp.
228-320
Week Six
Jacob Katz, “Post-Emancipation Development of Rights: Liberalism
and Universalism,” in David Sidorsky ed. Essays on Human Rights:
Contemporary Issues and Jewish Perspectives (Jewish Publication
Society, 1979), pp. 282-296
Abigail Green, “The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of
Human Rights?” Past and Present (2008) 199 (1): 175-205
Tusan, “Human Rights and the Armenian Genocide”
Mittleman, Chapter 5
Week Seven
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard
University Press, 2010), pp. 1-83
Hoffman,
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Chapter 1 “The End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights: The
Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture”
Chapter 2, “The ‘Human Rights Revolution’ at Work: Displaced
Persons in Postwar Europe”
Chapter 3, ‘Legal Diplomacy – Law, Politics and the Genesis of Postwar
European Human Rights’
Chapter 4, “Rene Cassin: Les droits de l’homme and the Universality of
Human Rights,” 1945-1966
Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights”
Reading from Jacques Maritain, “The Individual and the Person,”
Natural Law,” “Human Rights” “The Person and the Common Good”
Week Eight
Dan Edelstein, “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” Journal of Modern History
86:3 (Sept. 2014), pp. 530-565
Moyn, pp. 84-230
UNIT THREE : HUMAN RIGHTS IN MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT
Week Nine
Introduction from Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics
Milton R. Konvitz, “Man’s Dignity in God’s World,” (1971), in Idem,.
Judaism and Human Rights (Norton, 1972)
Haim Cohn, Human Rights and Jewish Law (Ktav, 1984) (selections)
Robert Cover, “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social
Order,” Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 1 (1987): 65-74
Irving Greenberg, “Ðialectics of Power: Reflections in Light of the
Holocaust”
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Yehuda Brandes, Judaism and Human Rights: The Dialectic between
‘The Image of God’ and ‘Holy Nation’ (Israel Democracy Institute, 2013)
[Hebrew] selections in translation
Alan Mittleman, “Two or Three Concepts of Dignity,” Jewish Review of
Books, Summer 2013
http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/405/two-or-three-conceptsof-dignity/
Abdulaziz Sachedina, “The Clash of Universalisms: Religious and
Secular in Human Rights,” in Idem. Islam and the Challenge of Human
Rights (Oxford University press, 2009)
UNIT FOUR : GENEALOGY AND JUSTIFICATION
Week Ten
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, chapter 1
Leo Strauss, “Notes on Schmitt’s ‘The Concept of the Political’, in
Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem
(Cambridge University Press)
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities” Daedalus, Winter,
2000, pp. 1-29
Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human
Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2013)., Intro, chapters 1-3, 6
Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Idolatry”
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad
(University of Notre Dame University Press, 2006), chapter 1
UNIT FIVE: NEW DIRECTIONS AND CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONS
Week Eleven
Goodhart, Chapter 8, ‘Political Democracy and State Repression,”
Chapter 9, “Global Civil Society and Human Rights,”
Chapter 13, “Human Rights and Forced Migration,”
Chapter 14, “Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights”
Chapter 17, “Humanitarian Intervention”
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Chapter 19, “Transitional Justice”
Week Twelve
Martha Nussbaum, “Women’s Capabilities and Social Justice”
Thomas Carothers, “The Global Political Marketplace”
Week Thirteen
This time will be held in reserve for things we have not covered and
topics emerging from your discussions that you would like to bring up.
Final Take-Home Exam
The Final will be a 2000 word, take-home essay analyzing and
reflecting on the argument of Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of
Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013)
Camus – “Relative Utopia is the only realistic choice; it is our last frail
hope of saving our skins”
(Neither Victim, etc. 1980 ed. P. 44)
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