Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

The peace movement and the language of rights

My second argument is that rights talk was rare in connection with the peace movement prior to the late 1970s.

With hindsight it is surprising how little the absolutist wing did to present its claim for exemption from military service as a right. In the favourable intellectual climate of a United States discussing its Bill of Rights in 1789, James Madison proposed adding to the constitution's Second Amendment the clause: ‘but no person religious scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to bear arms in person’. Such a clause would not have protected members of pacifist sects from non-combatant service or the duty to hire a substitute, so would not in any case have satisfied all absolutists. However, Madison did not get his way, with the result that the United States has regarded such exemption from military service as it later came to provide as a legislative grace and not as an inalienable right.8

In any case, the absolutists who might have benefited from Madison's proposal did not think in terms of human rights. The earliest pacifists talked a language of godliness rather than of rights, and derived their refusal of military service from their distinctive vocations as Quakers, Mennonites or the like, and not from their status as Christians let alone as human beings. Indeed, as late as the First World War the occasional Quaker who was anxious about national security expressed relief that most of his fellow citizens were non-Quakers, and would therefore protect him against aggression.9 Even after secular pacifism emerged, it for a while still talked in religiose terms of the sanctity of human life. Thus when socialist pacifists launched the No-Conscription Fellowship, they did so ‘because they consider human life to be sacred and cannot, therefore, assume the responsibility of inflicting death’.10 Likewise, when humanitarian and utilitarian pacifists established the Peace Pledge Union, they did so because they believed that war imposed, respectively, unacceptable personal suffering and excessive net costs. Only after pacifism's political prospects had long been shattered by Hitler was the language of rights to be invoked in respect of conscientious objection.

Historically, the reformist wing of the peace movement for the most part also avoided rights talk, which the influential Bentham famously dismissed as ‘nonsense on stilts’. Instead, as I have argued, it essentially proposed ideologically inspired reforms of the international system or of the states composing it. However, one of those reforms was to create republics on the model of the French Revolution; and pacificists in this tradition talked the language of the rights of man.

However, those talking the language of rights posed two problems for the peace movement. The first was that many were crusaders rather than pacificists. This was true of Paine, author of Rights of Man: an enthusiastic Girondin, he wanted France to win its war against Britain and thereby export its revolution, and thus constituted an embarrassment to an incipient British peace movement that was concerned to establish its apolitical respectability. (Godwin was opposed to coercion.

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