Harvard University Press Blog

The World Order Known as Umpire

In American Umpire, historian Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman argues against the familiar notion of the United States as imperial power. In her telling, many of the values and ideals that have become prevalent in the world may have originated with America, but they spread on their own merits, pushing most of the world in the direction of democratic capitalism. The United States did play a unique role in international affairs, Cobbs Hoffman argues, but it did so as a necessary and welcome arbitrator.

Arbitration itself is one of three goals or practices that Cobbs Hoffman sees as having gradually supplanted “the world order known as Empire.” Along with arbitration of disputes are access to opportunity and transparency in government and business. World War II was a watershed event in the transmission of those values, and Cobbs Hoffman notes that in the war’s aftermath the United States stepped forward to play an international part that was then sorely needed.

American Umpire traces world history from the American Revolution to the present, documenting the spread of these global values and the largely benevolent role Cobbs Hoffman sees the U.S. as having played. In that verdict, of course, she’s at odds with any number of critics of America’s international conduct, historian and HUP author Andrew Bacevich perhaps most prominent among them.

One of the interesting things about that disagreement, though, is that each narrative arrives at the same place: whether its leadership has been for better or for worse, welcome or resented, it’s time for the United States to step back from its role as the world’s steward. As Cobbs Hoffman sees it, the United States should greatly reduce its global presence, retire some of its permanent foreign military bases, and make room for other nations to lead. And, as she argued last week in a much noted New York Times piece, doing so would significantly reduce American defense spending, ameliorating the country’s struggling economy and helping to curtail its partisan budget battles.

Part of Cobbs Hoffman’s project, then, is to help the world see ways to carry on in relative peace after the retirement of its American umpire:

How the United States might cease playing umpire is not obvious. The trends toward access, arbitration, and transparency have not yielded an idyllic world. Violent, divisive conflicts remain. Holding the proverbial tiger by the tail, the U.S. government has been loath to let go. Perhaps by examining how the American role developed, this book will encourage other trustworthy nations to do more policing and the United States to do less—as occurred during the Libyan crisis of 2011, when France and Britain took the lead.

The Republican political objection to that strategy of “leading from behind” in Libya, the forceful arguments from the likes of Senator John McCain that the U.S. must intervene in Syria, and the persistent strain of American exceptionalism in the 2012 presidential contest all serve to illustrate the many domestic obstacles in the way of an international American drawdown. For her part, Cobbs Hoffman is dismissive of those who worry that the world would fall to instability without American lead (“It’s patronizing and naïve to think that America is the only truly ‘necessary’ country.”), but the nature of the above-noted objections indicates the challenges to the corrective she’s offering. For it’s likely that the very voices who’ll most welcome her depiction of American benevolence are those least likely to heed her plea for the nation now to stand aside, and those most likely to agree with her calls for a reduced American role are likely least inclined to accept her characterization of its historical valence.

Here’s Cobbs Hoffman describing the book:

 

Tracing the Ties that Bind Blacks and Jews in History and Myth

Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”

Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.

Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”

In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:

Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.

Historians as Storytellers

The opening-night plenary of this month’s American Historical Association conference focused, as such sessions often do, on how professional historians can bring their work to a wider audience. Titled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” and chaired by AHA President William Cronon, the session featured food writer Michael Pollan, who urged historians to turn to more journalistic storytelling techniques. “Why,” he asked, “do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mr. Pollan, a journalism professor and author of best sellers like The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, pointed out that works of history often end up on best-seller lists. But much of the time those best sellers are not written by professional historians. And when it comes to important questions about how things came to be the way they are, he said, historians have ceded territory to other disciplines, like behavioral economics and social psychology… Write in a human voice, he encouraged. Embrace storytelling techniques like scene-setting, suspense, and personification. Pose questions of current interest, and answer them. “We need that now as a society more than ever before,” he said. “We live in this fog of presentness. Every politician would have us forget what they said yesterday.”

Now, it’s not as if legions of historians are intentionally denying us page-turners. The structural dictates of academic writing don’t always lend themselves to gripping narrative, and we shouldn’t imagine that what someone like Pollan does isn’t a distinct skill of its own. Even still, says the NYT, Pollan’s challenge struck a chord.

Of course, it’s not just best-selling books that are built on the work of professional historians; Hollywood films, too, can sport lengthy bibliographies full of academic history. Spielberg’s Lincoln, with its attendant debates, is but the most recent example. And, in fact, last week The New Republic’s Timothy Noah offered a list of the books upon which Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner says he most relied. Though Noah is oddly skeptical of Kushner’s professed collection, it’s a great bunch of books. Many of them come from university presses, and even a couple from us.

Cronon, whose essay “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” ran in the January 2012 issue of Perspectives on History, titled his presidential address “Storytelling.” “We need to remember the roots of our discipline,” he said, “and be sure to keep telling stories that matter as much to our students and to the public as they do to ourselves.” You can watch the full address below.

 

Exit, Voice, and Revolution

Esteemed social scientist Albert O. Hirschman died this week at 97, having lived a fascinating life shaped by war, migration, and an iconoclastic perspective on conventional wisdom. He’s best known for Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, a 1970 book that many consider one of the twentieth century’s most influential works of political economy. In his famous formulation, “exit” and “voice” represent two contrasting responses of consumers or members of organizations to what they sense as deterioration in the quality of the goods they buy or the services and benefits they receive. To exit is to simply leave, usually in favor of another firm or organization perceived to be better. Voice, on the other hand, is the act of agitating from within with the goal of recuperating the quality judged to have been lost. Exit is essentially a private decision, whereas voice is typically a public activity. A key theme of the book was that exit often works to undermine voice, as easy availability of exit will undercut any instinct to use one’s own voice or to organize a chorus of others. “The presence of the exit alternative,” he wrote, “can atrophy the development of the art of voice.”

Decades after the publication of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman revisited his famous framework in an essay for 1995’s A Propensity to Self-Subversion. He’d learned that it’d become common to use his thesis to explain the Eastern European uprisings of 1989, and he spent a year in Berlin considering its applicability. As evident in the passages excerpted below, Hirschman had both the confidence to assess the validity of his career-making insights, and the humility to accept the ways in which they were wanting.

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The year 1989 was greeted with something of a yawn. Its first half would be marked by the elaborate, far-flung, and infinitely wordy bicentenary commemoration of the French Revolution. Everything was laid out well in advance, and the schedule of events was strictly followed up to the appointed climax, the celebrations of the Fourteenth of July in Paris. Thereafter, with the bulk of festivities, conferences, and speeches over, people would return to their usual pursuits. But then, as though the spirit of revolution, once invoked, assumed a life of its own, came the surprise, the “divine surprise” of that year: a series of totally unexpected political and popular movements broke out in rapid succession in Eastern Europe—from Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia to Bulgaria and Romania—overturning the hitherto uncontested power of the Communist parties and thereby altering fundamentally the seemingly stable bipolar world order of the preceding forty-five years.

The most radical of these changes took place in the German Democratic Republic, where the internal convulsion led in short order to the extinction of the political entity in which it occurred. The East German state was unable to survive the collapse of Communist power and was absorbed (geschluck, or “swallowed,” is the expressive term often used) by its outsize twin, the Federal Republic of Germany, within a year of the opening of the Berlin Wall.

Despite a considerable outpouring of articles and books—including some autobiographical accounts by key actors—a great deal about the events of 1989 remains poorly understood. The very fact that they came as a total surprise to both spectators and actors suggests that our capacity to comprehend large-scale political and social change remains utterly underdeveloped. Under the circumstances, any conceptual tool that holds out the promise of providing a handle on the enigmatic events is likely to be eagerly seized. This is what happened in Germany to the concepts of “exit” and “voice,” which I had proposed in a book published in 1970.

The German translation of that book was published in 1974, under a title that means, literally, “outmigration and contradicting.” This was a daringly free, though apt, translation of the terms exit and voice, and it may have been chosen by the translator because even then migration and would-be migration were characteristic alternatives to actual resistance in the German Democratic Republic. So the title, with its accent on migration as a primary form of exit, may have contributed to making the book appear particularly relevant to the commotion of 1989. In any event, only six days after the spectacular opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s most respected daily newspaper, published an article by Henning Ritter, director of the social science and humanities section, with the title “Abwandern, Widersprechen: Zur aktuellen Bedeutung einer Theorie von A. O. Hirschman” (To exit, to voice: On the current relevance of a theory of A. O. Hirschman). According to Ritter, my 1970 thesis was being tested “experimentally on a large scale” by the upheaval in East Germany. Since then, several political scientists and sociologists have made extensive, if on occasion conflicting, uses of the concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty in interpreting the events of 1989, now generally called die Wende (the turn). Eventually the topic even received a degree of official sanction as the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association), an agency of the Federal Republic, listed the exit-voice approach to the analysis of the Wende among the research projects eligible for its grants.

The Mighty, Majestic River of Persian Literature

We’ve just published Hamid Dabashi’s The World of Persian Literary Humanism, and write today to share news of a discussion of the book taking place this very evening at the Asia Society in New York. The event, which features Dabashi in conversation with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert I. Williams Term Professor of History, will be streamed live at AsiaSociety.org beginning at 6:30pm ET, and viewers are encouraged to submit questions throughout the talk.

Dabashi’s book, one of the most ambitious on our docket this fall, presents an exploration of 1,400 years of Persian literature in order to reconceive the question of what it means to be human, which has so long been dominated by a Western perspective. He tracks the emergence and spread of Persian literary humanism (Adab) from Bengal to Istanbul, from central Asia to the eastern coasts of Africa, always with present-day Iran as its epicenter. In his own rich prose, Dabashi gives us Persian literature as a river, “mighty and majestic,” the navigation of which demands “a fluidity of narrative that comes to terms with its existential immediacy, as if it had no history, and yet is fully aware of the expansive history that it tacitly flaunts.” This river of Persian literature, he writes, is “flowing from an infinity of historical sources, comes to you with the massive volume of its abiding presence, and leads to the immortality of a yet-to-be-named sea.”

As Dabashi explains in the video below (after a long gaze on the book’s physical presentation), this is a story he’s always wanted to write:

We write the books we wish we had to read. This book, in particular, is in effect a love letter to the literary heritage that has made me—and millions of other people like me—possible. Possible, I say, in our language and diction, in the mode and abode of our being, but above all, in the cosmopolitan worldliness that is—and is made possible by—Persian literature. I have put everything I have in it. My defiance against European Orientalist traditions, against Iranian nativist historiography, and against North American comparative literary criticism, overcoming them all and thus reclaiming the magnificent worldliness of Persian literary humanism.

 

At the Asia Society’s website you can read an interview with Dabashi, and remember to tune in to AsiaSociety.org/Live this evening to join him and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet as they ride the river of Adab.

Limiting the Horror of War

From our modern vantage, warfare of the past often appears barbaric. The close quarters of combat and high death counts, all conducted at the whim of rulers, can strike us as monstrously inhumane. And yet, as James Whitman argues in The Verdict of Battle, pitched battles of the past were far more effective at containing their violence than today’s sprawling wars of idealism. In the article and video below, Whitman details the evolution of warfare, and highlights some lessons of the past.

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Pitched battles are gruesome events. Consider the description of the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 given by Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross: “The poor wounded men... were ghastly pale... They begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death-struggle...” When we read such accounts it is difficult to imagine that anybody could regard a pitched battle with anything but horror.

Nevertheless for many centuries our ancestors thought of pitched battles as a good thing—in fact, a blessing for society. A pitched battle may be nightmarish for the soldiers who fight it, but it is a contained way of settling an international dispute. If a conflict can be decided by a day of concentrated killing on the battlefield, then violence can be prevented from spilling over to the rest of society. In fact, for many centuries staging a battle was deemed to be a perfectly acceptable, and highly desirable, legal procedure. In the Middle Ages, pitched battles were regarded as “judgments of God,” lawful ways of calling upon the Almighty to decide an international dispute. In the eighteenth century, they were regarded as settlement procedures, fought under a “tacit contract of chance.” Eighteenth-century battles were a kind of lawful wager, by which the warring sovereigns agreed to allow their conflict to be settled by the “chance of arms.”

 

To modern lawyers, such attitudes seem incomprehensible and repellant. We cannot accept the idea that international disputes could be resolved by deliberately staging a mass killing on a battlefield. The modern law of war is humanitarian law. It is founded on the proposition that war is a curse, and that conflicts should be resolved through peaceful means, with war used only as a desperate last resort.

When States Decay

Continuing our election-season series of consulting with the Classics, we turn today to Polybius, and the brief conclusion to his “Treatise on the Roman Republic,” as offered in Book 6 of The Histories, contained in Loeb Classical Library Volume 138. This translation, published in 2011, is a thorough revision of W. R. Paton’s 1922 text.

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That all existing things are subject to decay and change is a truth that scarcely needs proof; for the course of nature is sufficient to force this conviction on us. There being two agencies by which every kind of state is liable to decay, the one external and the other a growth of the state itself, we can lay down no fixed rule about the former, but the latter is a regular process. I have already stated what kind of state is the first to come into being, and what the next, and how the one is transformed into the other; so that those who are capable of connecting the opening propositions of this inquiry with its conclusion will now be able to foretell the future unaided. And what will happen is, I think, evident. When a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long established prosperity, life becomes more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be. As these defects go on increasing, the beginning of the change for the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse-proud display; and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion’s share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob rule.

The "Cabul Prisoners" and the Buddhas of Bamiyan

Llewelyn Morgan’s The Buddhas of Bamiyan is the most recent installment in the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard. The book mines the history and meaning of these colossal figures, which stood for 1,400 years before their destruction by the Taliban in 2001. In the post below, Morgan tells of a visit to the grave of a woman whose life story he came to know during his work on the book.

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On a grey and drizzly English day earlier this summer I found myself in a cemetery in Somerset, feeling more emotional than I should have in front of the grave of a stranger. I hadn’t had much to go on: it was somewhere in the village of North Cheriton, and it had a cross. But I had scraped the mud away from the short inscription and there she was:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JULIA FLORENTIA MULOCK

WIDOW OF COL MULOCK CB BORN IN AFGHANISTAN

JUNE 24 1842 DIED AT NORTH CHERITON APRIL 23 1910

Julia Mulock, née Sturt, had become a minor obsession of mine as I wrote The Buddhas of Bamiyan. Aside from her remarkable early life, Julia came to encapsulate for me Britain’s long and spasmodically intense relationship with Afghanistan, a relationship as easily forgotten as this memorial in an English country graveyard.

Chapel and Graveyard at North Cheriton

Julia Florentia Sturt had been born in captivity in Kabul. Her mother was Alexandrina Sturt, a prisoner of the Afghans; her father, Lieut. John Sturt, was already dead. He had been an officer of Engineers in the British force occupying Kabul during the First Afghan War, a misguided attempted to establish a buffer zone between British India and the Russian Empire encroaching from the north. A series of tactical errors resulted in a chaotic British retreat in midwinter, under ferocious attack from all sides, through the mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad, one of the most notorious disasters in British imperial history. A measure of the horror of this massacre is that Sturt was said to have been “the only man of the whole force who received Christian burial.” Very few indeed survived it, but Sturt’s pregnant widow Alexandrina, her mother Lady Sale, and a number of other soldiers and dependents were taken into custody by Akbar Khan, leader of the Afghan resistance, and spent nine months as effective hostages while the First Afghan War lurched towards its messy conclusion.

In those nine months the “Cabul Prisoners” became celebrities, their predicament the object of rapt interest by the British press and public in a way that has been compared to the US hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979-81. The most celebrated of them all was Julia’s grandmother and namesake, Florentia, Lady Sale, a tough, no-nonsense army wife (her husband, Sir Robert Sale, was all this time besieged by Akbar Khan in Jalalabad) whose journals of her experiences later became a publishing sensation. On July 24 1842 (note that Julia’s grave inscription gets the date wrong), Lady Sale dryly recorded the arrival of her granddaughter: “At 2 P.M. Mrs. Sturt presented me with a grand-daughter;—another female captive.”

In the latter stages of their captivity, as a British “Army of Retribution” closed in on Kabul, the prisoners were moved up from Kabul to Bamiyan, high in the Hindu Kush. Conditions were grim, and they faced the awful prospect of being marched north, beyond the mountains, and sold into slavery. But they also had the opportunity to visit what a series of European visitors to Afghanistan over the previous decades had made a famous monument, the cliff face peppered with caves and containing the giant Buddha statues. Lady Sale’s journal was illustrated with “some very pretty and correct sketches” by another captive, Lieut. Vincent Eyre, including three images of the Buddha cliffs.

That old lady in North Cheriton wouldn’t have remembered anything about Bamiyan, or the emotional scene when a force led by Lady Sale’s husband rescued them in September 1842. But she probably did retain some memories of the amazing reception when her family visited Britain in 1844. When they first landed at Lyme Regis (from a ship which the press were delighted to discover was called the True Briton), Lady Sale, her husband, daughter and granddaughter Julia were mobbed by well-wishers: “as soon as their presence became known,” according to The Times, “the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, and the inhabitants of Lyme, vied with each other in offering their congratulations, while the church bells poured forth their merriest strains of harmony…” There were similar scenes in Londonderry, Liverpool, Southampton, and London. Lady Sale was the heroine of the hour. At Astley’s Amphitheatre a circus performance culminated in “Lady Sale” fighting a double sword combat “with six Afghans, whom she put to flight.” This lionizing of Lady Sale isn’t so hard to analyze, a substitute victory that softened the dismay Britain had felt at the humiliating retreat from Kabul.

We catch a (slightly jaundiced) glimpse of the family group on their return journey to India at the end of 1844, in letters of Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor General of India: Sir Robert Sale, “one of our military heroes seen to most advantage with a sabre in his hand,” the “very coarse” Lady Sale “coming out with a direct plain oath,” “Mrs [Alexandrina] Sturt pretty but unfeeling, the little daughter born in captivity.” Alexandrina Sturt could be forgiven for being emotionally withdrawn, we might think. As for Julia, incredibly, captivity in Afghanistan wasn’t the greatest trauma that she suffered early in life. On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, her mother Alexandrina was killed alongside her new husband, Major James Garner Holmes, beheaded by rebellious troops during the “Indian Mutiny.”

At 17 Julia married a military man 25 years her senior (they consistently falsify their ages in the census, not making Julia any easier to trace). Julia’s later years were no bed of roses, following her husband on his postings around the Empire. She lost two sons who followed the family tradition into the army. But it was to all appearances a happy marriage. Certainly Julia’s final years at The Old Rectory in leafy North Cheriton (a comfortable house up the hill from the graveyard where she now lies) were as far removed as it is possible to imagine from the place and circumstances of her birth.

Human Rights and the Glamour of Dissent

In a recent NYT opinion piece sparked by the now-resolved international episode of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest to American protection, Samuel Moyn considers the evolving implications of “human rights.” Moyn is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, in which he argues that the modern conception of human rights begins not with the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the decade after 1968. In his op-ed, Moyn writes that what was initially an “uncontroversial effort to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold war’s ideological battles” has since become both more familiar and less clear-cut:

In reporting on Mr. Chen, most publications, including this newspaper, used the terms “dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer to him.

However, since the time Amnesty International and other groups popularized those phrases, human rights—a term that once meant the defense of individuals against the oppression of an unjust state—has come to imply other things, too.

Today, it is just as likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty—not to mention a threat to their manner of rule.

Moyn goes on to detail how the concept of human rights has “lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity” and become a political tool. Even still, he writes, human rights can be useful to “Chinese dissidents and their Western allies” just as they’d been to the “glamorous dissidents” who came before.

In describing Chen, Moyn knowingly evokes the codified concept of the dissident (“the lone icon speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule, the anonymous but courageous network at home that sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied around his cause, and the governments that made their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral ideals and geopolitical interests”), but elsewhere uses “dissent” in a fairly straightforward fashion. A short op-ed can sustain only so much complication, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see the concept of dissent taken as stable in the course of a discussion of the evolution of human rights.

Jonathan Bolton’s Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism is another recent HUP book that deals with some of the same events and themes as does Moyn in The Last Utopia. Bolton’s book unpacks the myths and the glamour to show how the struggle against state repression was felt by those who lived it, making clear the messy humanity of dissent.

A Nation Among Nations

In his compelling new book, historian Eliga H. Gould argues that the United States at its founding faced a paradox that’s now rarely acknowledged. As Gould explains in Among the Powers of the Earth, the young Union’s desired state of independence could only actually be achieved by claiming—and being granted—full membership in the community of nations. “We think of the American Revolution as the moment when Americans began to make their own history,” Gould notes in the video below. “It actually would be much more accurate to say it’s the moment when we began to make the history that others were prepared to let us make.”

 

 

 

Gould makes the case that the Declaration of Independence and many of the other founding documents from the American Revolutionary period demonstrate that what Americans actually sought was independence under the law of nations, rather than some sort of complete freedom from external obligations. So, even in that moment when a budding nation was determined to free itself from the constraints of colonial rule, the American founders were conscious of the need to conform to what other nations deemed legal.

To Gould, even the United States Constitution should be understood as an attempt to secure international recognition, rather than just a document outlining American liberties and rights. And one of the fascinating implications of Gould’s argument is what this American conformity meant for the spread of what was previously a particularly European law of nations. In the course of staking its independence in the New World, then, the United States also served as a new outpost for and exporter of a distinctly European sense of sovereignty, which had tremendous global and local implications.

It says a lot about the United States as a nation that this early need for approval and membership is largely absent from the stories we tell ourselves about the country’s founding. It’s not surprising, of course, given the still-thriving streak of American exceptionalism that’s always characterized America’s conception of itself.

To Gould, though, Among the Powers of the Earth doesn’t simply force us to reconceive American origin stories. The book should also help to assuage some of the concerns of those made uneasy by the prospect of a world in which the United States is but a member nation, no longer a singular leader, master of its own destiny. “I think it’s comforting to know that the founders faced a very similar set of problems and that even though there were moments when they made missteps, that they also came through it. And certainly the hope is that we too, today, will find our way through it as they did then.”