Description
Book SynopsisThis remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leadersincluding Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenbergengaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrary presents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today''s human rights debates.
Since its adoption in 1948, historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was influenced by UNESCO''s 194748 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, that supposedly demonstrated a truly universal consensus on human rights. Based on meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contrary provides a curated history of the UNESCO human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and univers
Trade Review
"In this clever and timely book, Mark Goodale complicates the presumed universality of human rights, providing an alternative history of the UNESCO process. Besides representing a fabulous archival 'find,' Letters to the Contrary provides vital historical and anthropological analysis to illuminate these texts. This stellar book is novel in its focus on a largely overlooked episode in the history of UNESCO and rights and classic in the sense that rights and internationalism continue to be central to so many disciplines today. Unearthed letters from the likes of Eliot, Auden, Schoenberg, Carr, and Huxley form a veritable who's who of twentieth-century political thought. Lively, eminently readable, and utterly stimulating."—Lynn Meskell, Stanford University
"Goodale's superb reconstruction of the history surrounding the UNESCO-sponsored survey of human rights demonstrates perfectly the political and contingent nature of the origins of the international human rights enterprise. It reveals both the centrality of philosophy to that enterprise, and the virtual impossibility of seeking a conception of human rights that is universal in philosophical analysis rather than political compromise."—Philip Alston, New York University
"Human rights might survive our age of rupture if we cease to delude ourselves with myth-making about their historical origins. In this outstanding book, Mark Goodale shows unequivocally that the creation moment of 'the age of rights' was in no sense universal at all. Letters to the Contrary makes it impossible to defend the triumphalist vision of the postwar human rights story with the blithe assertion that everybody agreed human rights were now the only game in town."—Stephen Hopgood, SOAS, University of London
"All international human rights lawyers concerned with the universality of human rights should read this book. Mark Goodale reveals how human rights comparison and distinction, not identification of a common denominator, were at the core of the UNESCO human rights survey and the resulting examination of the grounds of an international declaration of human rights. Rediscovering a differentiated and culturally sensitive philosophical discussion of human rights is not only humbling, it allows us to hope for reinvigorated universal debate."—Samantha Besson, University of Fribourg
Table of Contents
History: UNESCO in the Paradigmatic Transition
Interpretations: From a "Hollow Sham" to a "Plurality of Cultural Values"
Memorandum and Questionnaire Circulated by UNESCO on the Theoretical Bases of the Rights of Man
The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights
Foreword and Introduction to Human Rights, Comments and Interpretations, UNESCO 1949
Liberalism from the Ashes
Beyond Egotistic Man: Communist, Socialist, and Social Democratic Challenges
Rights in a Sacred Universe
The Universal Declaration of Human Duties
The Technological Society of the Future
Universal Human Rights in a Colonial World
Human Rights as History and Practice
Specific Freedoms
From Repudiation to the Play of Fancy
