Humanity Journal

This is part two of a two-part post. Part one is available here. Abstract: Much controversy has arisen around leftist attempts to curb provocative expression, particularly hate speech directed at certain vulnerable social groups. That coupling of leftism with censorship is, however, historically recent. For Marx, controls on speech serve more to hamper human emancipation than to promote it. In this essay it is argued that Marx’s critiques of rights are not as categorical as is sometimes thought. The “property right” paradigm does indeed represent Continue reading →

This is part one of a two-part post. Part two will be available here. Abstract: Much controversy has arisen around leftist attempts to curb provocative expression, particularly hate speech directed at certain vulnerable social groups. That coupling of leftism with censorship is, however, historically recent. For Marx, controls on speech serve more to hamper human emancipation than to promote it. In this essay it is argued that Marx’s critiques of rights are not as categorical as is sometimes thought. The “property right” paradigm does indeed Continue reading → Continue reading →

The founding editorial collective of Humanity—Nehal Bhuta, Nils Gilman, Nicolas Guilhot, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, and Miriam Ticktin—is pleased to announce that, after ten years, its members are stepping down. To take the journal into the future, a new editorial collective has formed. Our transition has already begun, and the official switchover from one collective to the other takes place in the new year. We congratulate and welcome the members of the new editorial collective, who are already open to contact and open for consultation: Continue reading →

Over the course of this week, the Turkish government will be called to account for some of the most heinous human rights violations ever to be witnessed. This demand for justice won’t address the state’s reported crimes against the population of Afrin in the name of national security. And it will undoubtedly entail little, if any, scrutiny regarding the country’s current repressive measures against pro-democratic constituents. Indictments will not be made in international criminal courts or special tribunals. And the victims and perpetrators will not Continue reading →

My trip to Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg did not begin smoothly. I flew overnight from New York to Frankfurt, and from there to Vienna; boarding the third and last flight from Vienna to Lviv on Thursday afternoon, the computer beeped at my boarding pass. “Australians need a visa.” “I know; we buy it at the airport.” Not at Lviv airport, it turns out. Kiev? Sure. Or Odessa – no problem. But not Lviv. The security official remained unmoved by the fact that I had to give a conference Continue reading →

This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 5. The interwar period was a time of heightened confusion about the boundary between war and peace. The meaning of both terms became thoroughly destabilized by political events. In this context the legal effort to end war through outlawry had unexpected and counterproductive effects.[1] For by removing war from the realm of acceptable Continue reading →

This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 4. Hathaway and Shapiro claim that “the outlawry of war in 1928—and the broader legal transformation that it unleashed—made it safer to trade” (344). By introducing a safeguard against conquest, Kellogg-Briand released the energies of free trade and colonial nationalism, resulting in a globalized world economy and a quadrupling of the number of Continue reading →

This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 3. The Internationalists compellingly shows how the multi-layered nature of Old World Order made it difficult to undo all its principles at once. One of these principles was neutrality. Hathaway and Shapiro are not fans of it. They regard it as an “excuse” not to take action against aggressors and as a way Continue reading →

This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 2. Hathaway and Shapiro announce in their introduction that “this book is, at its core, a work of intellectual history” (xx). I am not sure that this does justice to the ambition of their project, which is much larger. In their conclusion, they summarize its essential point as the insight that “the choice Continue reading →

This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. xxii + 430 pp. If one asked a group of historians, political scientists, and lawyers what they would consider the most important single treaty or international agreement of the last two Continue reading →