On the Genealogy of Morals (The Nation)

re: Samuel Moyn writes, "The enterprise of writing the history of human rights has become a widespread activity only in the past decade. Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights is its most prominent result so far, identifying the Enlightenment and the age of democratic revolutions as the moment when the cause was born. Yet if human rights history is now chic, it is also confused. A few months ago the president of the main American professional association of historians announced to all students of the past--whatever the place and time and subject of their research--that they "are all historians of human rights." But what could such a claim possibly mean? /The most troubling shortcoming of the contemporary attempt to give human rights a history is that it distorts the past to suit the present..."...