Barbara J. Keys. Reclaiming American Virtue

Amid a growing body of scholarship on the history of human rights, Barbara J. Keys makes an important contribution with this deeply researched study. Echoing the recent emphasis among historians on human rights as contingent and rooted in political contestation, rather than a natural expression of universal morality, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s advances our understanding of how human rights moved to the center of U.S. foreign policy during the 1970s. Keys's most important contribution is to broaden the analytical lens beyond liberal human rights activists and their sympathizers in Congress. Keys convincingly argues that in the early 1970s advocates of an aggressive U.S. approach to the Cold War played a defining role in elevating the visibility of human rights in U.S. foreign policy. For cold warriors such as Senate Democrat Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson from Washington, human rights were a way to “reassert the fundamental immorality of communism, to revive Cold War priorities, and to position the United States once again on the side of both right and might” (p. 3).

Convention · Foreign policy · Fundamental rights · Human rights · Immorality · International human rights law · Morality · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Virtue · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies