Seeing the Myth in Human Rights

207 Pages·2017·1.072 MB·English

by  Jenna Reinbold

Seeing the Myth in Human Rights
PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS
Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor
A comlete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
SEEING THE MY TH
IN HUMAN RIGHTS
Jenna Reinbold
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-4881-4
to J + I + E
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Sacred Myth, Political Myth 21
Chapter 2. The Sacred Center of Human Rights 36
Chapter 3. The Sacred and the Social 62
Chapter 4. The Legal Personality and a New World Order 92
Conclusion. Making and Unmaking Political Myth 117
Appendix. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 133
Notes 139
Bibliography 173
Index 185
Acknowledgments 193
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PREFACE
The state is invisible; it must be personified before it can
be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined
before it can be conceived.
—Michael Walzer, “On the Role
of Symbolism in Political Thought,” 194
There are any number of reasons why one might object to seeing the myth
in human rights—why one might object, in other words, to the work of con-
ceiving of contemporary human rights as a powerful form of modern myth.
One might argue that such a conception ties contemporary human rights to
a religious logic that such rights were specifically designed to supersede. One
might argue that such a conception, in addition to undermining the avowed
secularity of such rights, also threatens to undermine their universality—to
portray human rights as intractably indebted to culturally specific values and
languages and thus to reinforce the perception of human rights as a mech-
anism for a subtle form of cultural imperialism. More generally, one might
argue that the word myth by definition serves to call into question the very
legitimacy or viability of human rights. All of these potential objections are
valid insofar as they presuppose a definition of myth as a vehicle for, on the
one hand, particular religious dogma or, on the other, erroneous or even
duplicitous discourse. The central premise of this book, however, is that such
presuppositions about myth are unfaithful to contemporary scholarship in
the field of religious studies, and that they are therefore blind to a series of
important insights that the academic study of religion has to offer into the
unique logic, authority, and history of universal human rights.
Contemporary scholarship on religion has converged upon an under-
standing of myth not merely as a mode of doctrinaire or duplicitous discourse,
but as a mode of human labor that serves the broad, enduring function of