Letters to the Contrary

A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey

Mark Goodale

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503605350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders—including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg—engaged 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 1947–48 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 universality of human rights. In collecting, annotating, and analyzing these responses, including letters and responses that were omitted and polite refusals to respond, Mark Goodale shows 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.

PART I

READING HUMAN RIGHTS HISTORY WITH A PERIOD EYE

Introduction

This project began its life as a mystery. In October 2005, I found myself amongst a group of junior scholars meeting in Berlin under the auspices of the Irmgard Coninx Stiftung, a small private foundation that had been created in 2001 in order to organize a set of yearly roundtables on the theme of transnationality. The 2005 meeting was dedicated to the problem of reframing human rights. Although the meeting was formally interdisciplinary, most of the participants came from the fields of political theory, philosophy, international relations, and law. Around an actual oversized roundtable, the thirty-five attendees engaged in several days of spirited and sometimes heated debate over highly abstract problems such as the relationship between human rights and collective goals, implementation versus universality, human rights and cosmopolitan justice, the idea of imaginary global communities, and arguments for a nonreligious grounding for human rights in a pluralistic world.

I was the only anthropologist at the meeting. It was clear that both the organizers and the other participants expected me to dutifully fill the anthropological slot by providing timely reminders of real-world human rights conflicts so that the proper thinkers around the table would have something more than arid philosophical categories to work with. Nevertheless, it was during these encounters that I learned that a concept like “normativity” could be deployed to certain effect when the ethnographer’s magic begins to wear off.

After one particularly long and grueling exchange on the question of the universality of human rights had continued into the hallways, I confronted a razor-sharp political theorist. I had been working for several years on the anthropology of human rights, a nascent specialty within the wider discipline that focuses on empirical research into what one volume describes as “culture and rights” (Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001). The idea was to conduct ethnographic studies on human rights practices in different parts of the world in order to understand more about the possibilities and tensions within what Kofi Annan (2000) described as the “age of human rights,” that is, the first decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, during which the “last utopia” (Moyn 2010) became a powerful force in global politics, international law, and socioeconomic development.

I explained that the growing database of anthropological research challenged claims for the universality of human rights. Moreover, I said, the problem of cultural diversity had been anticipated even before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948. As part of my wider interest in anthropology and human rights at the time, I was editing a major special issue of American Anthropologist entitled “Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key.” During the research for this special issue, I had learned about something called the “Statement on Human Rights,” a document that claimed to have been “submitted to the Commission on Human Rights, United Nations by the Executive Board, American Anthropological Association” in 1947 when it was published in the late-1947 number of American Anthropologist. As I put it to the political theorist, the collective body of anthropological data did not support the assertion of human rights universality even in 1947 (as the Statement on Human Rights had emphasized) and the more recent ethnography of human rights had done nothing to change this conclusion.

The political theorist regarded me with a look that seemed to indicate that he had a definitive, if surprising, answer to these objections: “But what about the UNESCO Philosophers’ Committee?” I paused for a moment as I desperately searched my internal mental files, a search that came up painfully empty. With a heavy if nervous skepticism that I hoped would check his advance, I asked, “what UNESCO Philosophers’ Committee?” He smiled and triumphantly explained that UNESCO had conducted a global survey on human rights in order to support the work of the Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Although it was not well-known (as my own ignorance demonstrated), UNESCO’s survey had proven that the underlying principles of human rights, principles that would later be codified in the UDHR, were in fact (not just in theory) universal, meaning that they were present within all the world’s cultures and belief systems despite the apparent surface diversity at which anthropologists had been scratching.

This was quite a stunning claim, and I asked the political theorist for his sources. He referred me to one volume: Mary Ann Glendon’s recently published A World Made New, which I later learned included a chapter on this mysterious UNESCO “Philosophers’ Committee.” Once I turned to this chapter in Glendon’s book, the question then became what her sources were for the discussion of this committee, whose world-historical findings on human rights universality would figure so prominently at different moments in what was otherwise a landmark study of Eleanor Roosevelt. Glendon’s primary source, as it turned out, was a book entitled Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations, published by UNESCO in 1949 with an introduction by the French Catholic natural rights philosopher Jacques Maritain. And that 1949 UNESCO publication did, indeed, reveal more information about a certain UNESCO process that had taken place during the drafting of the UDHR: a survey that had been undertaken, responses that had been received, and a consensus on general human rights principles that had supposedly been uncovered through the survey.

Yet these discoveries only deepened the mystery, since even a cursory reading of the 1949 UNESCO publication raised more questions than it answered: How was this survey conducted? Who authorized it? What kinds of questions were asked? To whom was the survey sent? How many surveys were sent and how many responses were received? What criteria were used in the analysis of the responses? Did the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR) authorize UNESCO to conduct the survey? Did the CHR consider the report written by UNESCO based on this survey? And, perhaps most important, did the findings of the UNESCO survey “prove” the universality of human rights despite the various critiques, including those included in the 1947 “Statement on Human Rights”? Very little had been written about the UNESCO human rights survey and by 2005, almost all references led back to Glendon’s 2001 book, which was based on the elusive 1949 UNESCO publication. Without knowing more about both the circumstances that had given rise to the UNESCO survey and the specific details of UNESCO’s work on human rights, it was impossible to answer these underlying questions.

Since I am an anthropologist and not a historian, I would have normally left this admittedly important historical puzzle aside to focus on more pressing contemporary ethnographic problems, particularly since the “age of human rights” was unfolding with such methodologically challenging intensity. Yet in a case of intellectual historical serendipity, it turned out that I was destined to pursue the case of the UNESCO survey further. For an early historical chapter in a book I was working on throughout 2007, a book on anthropology and human rights, I needed to know more about the Statement on Human Rights. During research in the United States National Anthropological Archives in Suitland, Maryland, I came across correspondence from 1947 between the Executive Committee of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and one anthropologist, Melville Herskovits, in which Herskovits writes to the AAA president (Clyde Kluckhohn), “here is the draft of the statement I sent to the UNESCO Committee, revised in accordance with the idea that it would be forwarded to the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations, from the Association” (US National Anthropological Archives, Presidential Correspondence, Box 2, 1947).

This meant that the Statement on Human Rights, with which I was very familiar, and the UNESCO human rights survey, with which (as we have seen) I was not, were in fact connected. This came as yet an additional surprise, since by this time I had written extensively about anthropology and human rights, and Herskovits’s statement was not mentioned at all in UNESCO 1949. Yet I still could not bring myself to commit to the historical detective work that was clearly necessary in order to solve the enigma of the UNESCO human rights survey and thus Herskovits’s (and by extension the AAA’s, and by even further extension, anthropology’s) connection with it. Even Mary Ann Glendon, in a personal communication, had acknowledged that even though “there is so little material to go on . . . the important thing is to figure out what really happened in that committee.”

In the end, professional circumstances allowed me to figure out what really happened in that committee. This is not to say that every detail is now known, or that every important question can be answered. Indeed, given what has come before, a heavy dose of historical humility is called for, especially since, as I have learned, historical research is as much about establishing what cannot be known (for practical, if not epistemological reasons) as it is about establishing what is known. Nevertheless, over the course of several years, research was conducted in three important archives for the project: the UNESCO archives in Paris; the special collections of the University of Chicago Library (which hold the papers of Richard McKeon, an important protagonist); and the Woodson Research Center in the Fondren Library at Rice University in Houston, Texas (which houses the Julian Huxley papers). This volume is the result of this research.

STRUCTURE OF THIS VOLUME

Given the centrality of UNESCO 1949 to debates taking place decades later over the UNESCO human rights survey of 1947–1948, the contents of the 1949 publication form the foundation for what appears here. Indeed, since UNESCO 1949 is so difficult to locate, either in its original British (Allan Wingate) or American (Columbia University Press) edition or in the 1973 Greenwood Press reprint, the publication of a new edition limited to the original contents would be easy to justify. UNESCO 1949 contains 35 separate entries: an introduction by Jacques Maritain; an uncredited foreword that was written by (and credited here to) Jacques Havet, the head of UNESCO’s philosophy section at the time of the survey; 30 responses to the UNESCO survey on human rights; 1 commissioned essay on the “conception of the rights of man in the U.S.S.R.” by the Soviet legal scholar Boris Tchechko (for which he was paid); a copy of the survey and accompanying memorandum on human rights distributed by UNESCO; and a report based on the findings of the survey sent by UNESCO to the UNCHR in August 1947. All of these entries are included in the current volume.

In the course of finding out “what really happened” during the UNESCO survey, however, a much wider collection of relevant sources was located in the archives. These include 22 additional responses to the survey; 1 submission (by Emmanuel Mounier) that was a reprint of an essay written in 1945; and, perhaps most surprisingly, a set of substantive refusals to formally respond to the UNESCO survey, which constitute important contributions to the question of human rights in their own right. I have only included the most interesting and consequential of these refusals, since the archives contain many other letters, telegrams, and other forms of correspondence that likewise refuse the invitation but for logistical reasons such as time, preexisting professional commitments, or confusion over the goals and methods of the project.

The various sources reproduced in this volume, both those that appeared in UNESCO 1949 and those that were discovered in the archives, have been relatively lightly annotated. I have retained most of the original footnotes as well as the varying composition styles that appear in the original. Abridgments have been kept to a minimum, since part of the rationale for this volume is to present the full body of materials related to the UNESCO human rights survey. Nevertheless, for reasons of economy, a few selections, including those of Merriam, Dutt, Blaha, Hessen, and Tchechko, have been somewhat abridged. Moreover, some of the chapters in UNESCO 1949 use ellipses, which suggests that some minor editing had already been done by the UNESCO Committee in 1947 and 1948, prior to publication. In order to distinguish between original footnotes and editorial additions new to this volume, the abbreviation “ed.” is used to indicate the latter. Finally, considerable effort has been made to include biographical notes on all the contributors to the volume, even though many of them (including Gandhi, Eliot, Auden, Aldous Huxley, Schoenberg, and Nehru) will be well-known to readers.

In addition to the original sources, the volume includes two expository chapters. The first is a detailed history of the UNESCO human rights survey within the broader context of the history of human rights in the years and decades after the Second World War and the creation of the United Nations. The second explains the organizational and interpretive logic behind the clustering of sources in Part III. Although a basic purpose of this volume is to provide, for the first time, the full range of materials associated with the UNESCO human rights survey so that others may come to their own conclusions about its meaning, interpretation, and historical significance, the volume’s second expository chapter does explain why it is implausible to argue that the UNESCO survey demonstrated the universality of human rights.

The volume concludes with a note on sources, describing the current state of research on the UNESCO survey and the role of various archives in this history, as a guide to future research.

UNDERSTANDING THE UNESCO SURVEY THROUGH A “PERIOD EYE”

The process of revealing the richness, complexity, and ultimate ambiguity in the UNESCO human rights survey has reinforced the importance of understanding it—and the history of human rights more generally—through what the British art historian Michael Baxandall (1972) calls a “period eye.” Baxandall argues that one must develop the capacity for comprehending paintings and other forms of art by learning how they would have been perceived and appreciated in their own terms and times. The reason for adopting a “period eye” is to avoid imposing later—often much later—standards and expectations on works of art that were created against the backdrop of very different aesthetic, cultural, and historical conditions.

Working through the primary sources around the UNESCO survey, it is striking to what extent the proposal for a new “declaration of the rights of man” was regarded with skepticism, confusion, even incredulity. While important actors and institutions were certainly committed to liberal human rights as the primary legal, political, and moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust and world war, many others, particularly those on the left, viewed human rights as a framework firmly rooted in the late eighteenth century and therefore long since obsolete. As Morris L. Ernst, cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, put it in his refusal to formally respond to the UNESCO survey, “It seems to me that we are finished with the era of passing general resolutions in regard to liberty and freedom” (see his entry in Part III, in “From Repudiation to the Play of Fancy”).

The period during which the UNESCO survey was undertaken, early 1947 to late 1948, was a time in which many proposals for the postwar order were being developed. These proposals were influenced by a range of currents and ideologies, not all of which were complementary. The discussions around human rights at the time took place within a swirl of debate and contention that involved widespread support for Soviet and socialist projects; a belief in the progressive aspects and dominance of technology; and the often conservative retreat into the certainties of religious faith and institutions. It is important to understand this liminal postwar but pre-UDHR period as one in which the idea of human rights was associated by its critics with a small cluster of Western national traditions (notably the American and French); viewed as the unmistakable normative underpinning of capitalism; and held in a certain disdain by many intellectuals, who regarded the “rights of man”—much as Jeremy Bentham had a hundred and fifty years earlier—as pernicious, since their metaphysical abstractness seduced people into ignoring other, more concrete, approaches to solving social and economic problems. In describing this relatively short period of about two years as a prehistory, it is not my intention to assign undue importance to the ratification of the UDHR in the broader historiography of human rights. Rather, it is to underscore the fact that at the time, at least for certain key actors and institutions in Europe and the United States, these months in which a declaration of human rights was being developed were seen as an important moment in the wider economic, political, and legal reconstruction of a fractured world.

Yet developing a period eye is not only necessary for gaining a fresh perspective on this critical moment when the UNESCO human rights survey to...