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Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Human Rights and History , Past & Present, Volume 232, Issue 1, August 2016, Pages 279–310, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw013
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Extract
Historians are the embalmers of our political and moral convictions. As soon as historiography begins to take an interest in an issue, we can be certain that it no longer possesses a self-evident presence in our society. Some questions and problems only become objects of history after society has become historically conscious of them. The history of workers boomed in the 1970s, for example, when industrial labour was in the process of disappearing, just as memory and its sites became a mode of inquiry for historians in the 1980s precisely at the moment when lived memory of ‘the age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) was disappearing together with its last generation.
The issue of human rights has by no means come so far, even if a certain historicizing sobriety has now set in among activists. 1 On the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere, human rights are still something like the doxa of our times: those ideas and sentiments that are tacitly presumed to be self-evident truths and not in need of any justification. 2 Who is opposed to human rights today? And who of those born before the late twentieth century would like to be reminded that earlier he or she had had little use for the concept of human rights? At least in the Euro-Atlantic world today the resonance of human rights is so universal and unassailable that in principle the only thing still debated is how they can best be realized on a global scale. We feel distressed and melancholic about the continued violation of human rights in our time but do not wish to abandon the concept altogether.
