(Source: Stanford University Press)
Stanford
University Press has recently published a book on the history of the UNESCO Human
Rights Survey of 1947-1948 and its subsequent influence on human rights.
ABOUT
Since its
adoption in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has served
as the foundation for the protection of human rights around the world.
Historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the UDHR was influenced
by UNESCO's 1947–48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural
and political leaders, a survey that supposedly revealed a truly universal
consensus on human rights. This book provides a curated history of the UNESCO
human rights survey and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates over
the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights.
Based on
meticulous archival research, Letters to the Contrary revises and
enlarges the conventional understanding of UNESCO's human rights survey. Mark
Goodale's extensive archival research uncovers a historical record filled with
letters and responses that were omitted, polite refusals to respond, and
outright rejections of the universal human rights ideal. This volume collects
these neglected survey responses, including letters by T. S. Eliot, Mahatma
Gandhi, W. H. Auden, and other important artists and thinkers.
In collecting,
annotating, and analyzing these responses, Goodale reveals an alternative
history that is deeply connected to the ongoing life of human rights in the
twenty-first century. This history demonstrates that the UNESCO human rights
survey was much less than supposed, but also much more. In many ways, the
intellectual struggles, moral questions, and ideological doubts among the
different participants who both organized and responded to the survey reveal a
strikingly critical and contemporary orientation, raising similar questions at
the center of current debates surrounding human rights scholarship and
practice.
This volume
contains letters and survey responses from Jacques Havet, Jacques Maritain,
Arnold J. Lien, Richard P. Mckeon, Quincy Wright, Levi Carneiro, Arthur H.
Compton, Charles E. Merriam, Lewis Mumford, E. H. Carr, John Lewis, Harold J.
Laski, Serge Hessen, John Somerville, Boris Tchechko, Luc Somerhausen, Hyman
Levy, Ture Nerman, R. Palme Dutt, Maurice Dobb, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin,
Marcel De Corte, Pedro Troncoso Sánchez, Mahatma Gandhi, Chung-Shu Lo, Kurt
Riezler, Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, Hubert Frère, M. Nicolay, W. Albert Noyes, Jr.,
Aldous Huxley, Ralph W. Gerard, Johannes M. Burgers, Humayun Kabir, A. P.
Elkin, S. V. Puntambekar, Leonard Barnes, Benedetto Croce, Jean Haesart, F. S.
C. Northrop, Peter Skov, Emmanuel Mounier, Maurice Webb, John Macmurray, Julius
Moór, L. Horváth, Alfred Weber, Don Salvador De Madariaga, Frank R. Scott,
Jawaharlal Nehru, Margery Fry, Isaac Leon Kandel, René Maheu, Albert
Szent-Györgyi, Morris L. Ernst, Arnold Schoenberg, W. H. Auden, Melville
Herskovits, Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, Ernest Henry Burgmann, Herbert Read,
and T. S. Eliot.
ABOUT THE
EDITOR
Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the
University of Lausanne and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights.
The author or editor of 12 other volumes, his most recent book is Anthropology
and Law: A Critical Introduction (2017).
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
For more
information, see the publisher’s
website
No comments:
Post a Comment