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The Conceptual Role of Social Movements

Social movements clearly have been a crucial factor in the process by which human rights have historically been implemented. Very often, the willingness of particular regimes to recognize human rights has been a direct result of popular mobilization. I would like to focus on the idea that social movements play an equally central role in the theory of human rights. This role has at least two aspects. First, social movements have been responsible for the evolution of the concept of human rights, gradually developing recognition that governments should be bound by certain constraints in the treatment of their citizens. Second, these movements serve as a way to test alternative theories of human rights, in particular the claim that Asian values may be a viable alternative to the prevailing idea of human rights that grew from Western European culture. The concept of human rights is generally regarded as a lineal descendent of medieval and Reformation natural rights theory and thus the product of political theorists like Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Yet with the single and somewhat dubious exception of property rights, most of the protections against government that we now associate with human rights did not emerge from the natural rights tradition. To be sure, Hobbes identified protection again self-incrimination as an element of natural liberty at the same time that it was being adopted in English courts on pragmatic grounds. For Locke, natural rights included the requirement that government may act against individuals only in accordance with general rules adopted in advance. These are fairly isolated correspondences, however. What seems most notable is not that they occur, but that they occur so rarely. Instead, the basic protections that we now associate with human rights first emerged from social movements. They were incorporated into the natural rights tradition only at the end of the eighteenth century, as that tradition was transformed into modern human rights theory. This point is illustrated by toleration, the prohibition of slavery, and the prohibition of torture. Freedoms of speech and religion, generally described as toleration, find their origin in the civic humanism of the Renaissance and the religious fanaticism of the Reformation. The humanists were instinctively tolerant, with their preference for concrete knowledge over abstract doctrine, their belief in people's essential similarity, and their enthusiasm for pagan Greece and Rome. The Protestants were decidedly intolerant at first but the extremely educative experience of being brutally oppressed taught them the disadvantage of their original ideas. Locke's famous Letter Concerning Toleration, for example, makes virtually no reference to his elaborate social contract theory, resting instead on religious arguments concerning personal salvation that originated in the Reformation. ^ The prohibition of slavery reveals a similar provenance in civic humanistic and religious thought rather than natural rights theory. Indeed, natural rights theory often provided a positive justification for slavery by treating human liberty, however natural, as fully alienable; Grotius and Selden, for example, base their arguments for total termination of natural liberty in the social contract on the morally self-evident position that individuals can sell themselves into slavery. The initial attack on slavery came from Spanish clerics, most notably Bartolome de Las Casas, but the first people to oppose