Jay Winter and Antoine Prost. René Cassin and Human Rights

Over the last decade the history of human rights has crystallized as a prospering field of research. Pioneering books have examined the notion of universal rights from various intriguing angles over a time period stretching from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Thus, they have contributed significantly to a new research landscape just opening up before our eyes. Against this backdrop Jay Winter and Antoine Prost seek to contribute to this rich literature by introducing what they call the “generational approach” (p. xviii). In their new book René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (originally published in French in 2011), both authors want to investigate the emergence of the international human rights regime through the lens of one of its supposed major protagonists. Their focus is on the colorful life of the prominent French jurist and diplomat René Cassin (1887–1976), who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his renowned commitment to human rights. By examining the biography of this extraordinary figure the authors aim to show what human rights meant to a generation that experienced two world wars and how these experiences shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Telling the history of human rights through the prism of an individual's life, Winter and Prost claim to add a “third approach” (p. xix) to the existing literature: “This biography is a history of the struggle for human rights in a specific time and place. We offer a different chronology and a compromise between those who see human rights as advancing in a glacial manner in a cumulative or additive process of gains and losses, and those who see it in terms of truncated evolution, with a radical break at a specific point in time” (p. xix).

Art history · Biography · Compromise · Declaration · Environmental ethics · Human rights · Political science · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy