book review
>Montaigne, the long party
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Michel de Montaigne is known among cat lovers for a popular quip: “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?” This is just one of the musings in his Essays — a book that could qualify today as a blog, for Montaigne was the first person to unabashedly write about himself, flaws and all.
Accustomed to Facebook, Twitter and blogs, we take disclosure as a given. But in the 1500s, public self-revelation was reserved for great people who accomplished great things, or, like St. Augustine and Dante, those writing about how they found God.
Then there was Montaigne, who, in the Essays, characterized himself as “idle. Cool in the duties of friendship and kinship, and in public duties. Too self-centered.” Not exactly the hero type. Nor did he expound on the greatness of God. In fact, his fear that death is nothingness bordered on atheism.
Purposely evading the so-called big ideas, Montaigne homed in on the quotidian, at times mundane, details. In the Essays, he divulged that though he knew many fair ladies in his prime, he had never seen his wife’s breasts — not even during sex — out of respect for her honor; that he “could dine without a tablecloth, but very uncomfortably without a clean napkin”; and that he liked his meat rare. One of his most famous essays, “Of experience,” included a long-winded description of the pain of expelling kidney stones.
>The human rights idea
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Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn has written the first sober history of the doctrine of human rights. His book The Last Utopia—together with David Rieff’s A Bed for the Night (2002) and Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists (2005)—is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the origins of our modern foreign-policy vocabulary.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Though many historians have traced human rights to the Enlightenment notion of the “rights of man,” Moyn draws a useful conceptual distinction. The “rights of man” described a “politics of citizenship at home,” in which the nation-state was seen as the ultimate locus of rights. But human rights activism implies a “politics of suffering abroad,” in which states are generally viewed as the problem. In this sense, the historical struggles of Jews, women, and blacks for the rights of citizenship—protections afforded by the state—were different from modern human rights struggles.
altimoniere 