The Russian Origins of Human Rights: a talk by Prof. Randall A. Poole

Abstract. Today, both the history and philosophical grounding of human rights are matters of fierce debate. One prominent figure in the debate is Samuel Moyn, professor of law and history at Harvard. In widely discussed books such as The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010) and Christian Human Rights (2015), Moyn argues that universal human rights are a recent concept, dating from the 1940s, and specifically are a product of Catholic philosophy of that era. The Catholic thinker who reinvented human rights was Jacques Maritain. He was among the founders of the French philosophical movement known as personalism, which he fashioned into his own Christian (or ‘integral’) humanism. By 1942, he turned it into a robust defense of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights followed in 1948, and Maritain was one of its intellectual architects.

Decades before Maritain, another tradition of Christian personalism had already developed into a theory of human dignity and human rights. In this lecture Randall Poole will argue for the Russian origins of human rights, showing how Russian philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries combined Orthodox Christian personalism with Kantian idealism to produce a powerful defense of rights-based liberalism. After the Russian Revolution, this rich intellectual legacy was transmitted by Nikolai Berdiaev and the Russian philosophical emigration to interwar France, where it helped form the milieu in which Maritain’s thought took shape.

The langugage of both talk and discussion is English.

The seminar will take place at Staraya Basmannaya 24/4, building 3 («korpus L»), room L-308.

In case you need a temporary pass to the HSE building please contact the manager of the School of History Nadezhda Nekrasova via the email nvnekrasova@hse.ru.