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AB - If—as Koskenniemi noted in the context of human rights history—the growth of historical interest in a certain phenomenon is correlated with its contemporary demise,1 then there is much to celebrate in the ever-growing interest in the history of capitalism.2 In the backdrop of the great recession of 2008,3 emerging scholarship has brought back questions of political economy to the fore of the debate.4 To do so, they have challenged the disciplinary boundaries between ‘history’, ‘economics’, ‘political science’, or ‘law’ to advocate for a profound inquiry into the economic structures that govern our everyday practices of production and consumption.5 As one contemporary scholar put it, it seemed the daughters and sons of 1999’s Battle of Seattle had ‘went to grad school’6—and they were ready for another round. As the echoes of 2008 continue to reverberate in our midst after the rise of the North Atlantic far-right in 2016 and the covid-19 crisis in 2020, a truly interdisciplinary inquiry into the political economy of unequal global governance seems more urgent than ever. In her timely contribution, Marks brings these insights from the history of capitalism in conversation with another burgeoning field: the history of human rights. The new millennium has not only witnessed a renewed interest in questions of international legal history,7 but a particular concern for the past, present and future of human rights knowledges and practices.8 As Marks herself notes, her book ‘comes on the heels of “an historical turn” ’ (p 13), that—while preceded by important contributions by Glendon9 or Hunt10—was ultimately sparked by Moyn’s controversial Last Utopia.11 Marks wishes to avoid, however, Byzantine debates about the origins (either temporal or geographical) of “human rights,12 and instead attempts to trace how the history of this idea intersected with particular changes in ‘the material conditions of life’ (p 16). Drawing from the previous debates on the ambivalent relationship between human rights and capitalism (or neoliberalism) in which she herself was a protagonist,13 Marks now turns to map how did the language of rights tamed (or fails to subdue) incipient capitalist practices that emerged during three centuries of English history. To do so, she reviews the different ways in which rights discourses and practices were invoked, contested, and disputed from the early Modern period up to the French revolution by the ‘radical’ tradition in English thought. Through a careful reading of textual primary sources in tandem with an analysis of elements of material culture (which includes paintings, cartoons, and even tokens), Marks reconstructs the context in which these radicals attempted to appeal to the language of rights to resist capitalist accumulation. She pays particular attention to the ambiguities and mixed success of these attempts. After all, she is looking in the past for answers to understand international human rights contemporary ‘contradictoriness and doubled-edged effects’, which renders them, at the same time, ‘pivotal and marginal, potent and ineffective, subversive and hegemonic’ (p 18). For all of their flaws, Marks argues, perhaps a thorough study of the radical men and women who used rights claims to challenge material inequalities in the past might enable us to better grasp the failings of our present strategies (and prepare for the future struggles). The use of inclusive language in the last phrase is not accidental at all. As we will see, Marks is especially attentive to the ideas and strategies espoused by English women–even if reactionary—to make themselves heard in a man’s world. In this review, I first sum some of Marks’ arguments regarding the insights of the radical tradition with regards to human rights thinking and practice. I argue that her work brings forward novel contributions, in both questions of substance and methodology, as it foregrounds ‘materiality’14 in international legal history (and the history of human rights in particular). Her history is not only based on the (important, at any rate) movement of ideas, but also in the material entanglements of such discourses. Her book, after all, does not deal with abstract notions of rights, but rather with everyday concerns related to ‘money, death, enclosure, trees […], and living’ (p 19). Moreover, I conclude that Marks, inadvertently perhaps, makes an important contribution to another expanding conversation: the debate on the relations between Christianity and human rights in history.15 In many ways, Marks highlights that one cannot separate the radical tradition from its deeply religious roots in English dissenting and nonconformist movements. For this reason, she shows that early invocation of rights should be read through the lenses of Christian thought, challenging the oft-cited assumption that rights were always a secular liberal discourse. However, perhaps her powerful revelations regarding the Christian heritage of radical ‘rights talk’ might undermine her aspirations to draw from the past for our present struggles. One is left wondering whether this radical tradition—with its language of ‘diabolical act[s] of greed and rapacity’ (p 38)—can still offer answers for contemporary dilemmas without undergoing a critical process of secularization. Aptly, the book begins and ends with the largely forgotten figure of Thomas Spence (1750–1814). Marks chooses this entry point because Spence, in the context of a land dispute in 1780, claimed to be the first person to invoke ‘the rights of man’ (p 2). While Marks shows us that his was certainly not the case, as there are written statements that use this phrase that predated his times, Spence’s proposal offers us a glimpse of a tradition ‘in which what is important is not the right to property, but instead the dispossession of the unpropertied’ (p 3). This tradition, Marks argues, has been largely forgotten in traditional historiographies of English human rights thought that usually revolve around the two poles of Burke’s anti-rights conservatism and Paine’s pro-rights hegemonic liberalism (p 3). Instead, Mark uses Spence to trace a long list of movements and thinkers that resist any categorization as Burkean or Paineites and should instead be read as a ‘radical underworld’ which tied questions of material distribution with claims of rights. In what follows, I will offer some snapshots of this tradition, highlighting Marks careful reconstruction of their flaws, potentialities, and aspirations. Enclosure, or more precisely, the counter-conducts and acts of resistance against these procedures, is certainly the narrative arc of the book. Hence, Marks begin by showing us how early thinkers of the 16th century revolved against the privatization of the commons. At the same time, however, she is quick to clarify that many of these early (and even later) radicals ‘were by no means revolutionaries [… r]ather they developed an analysis which aimed to highlight practices and processes that were endangering [the social] order and threatening to break it apart’ (p 21). In this vein, chapter II explores the works of More, Dudley, and Crowley as representatives of a ‘the group of prominent clerics and polemicists that barred (almost) no holds in their diagnosis of the state of the nation, and became, for a time, the scourge of, or any rate purveyor of unwelcome truths to, the English ruling classes’ (p 22). Despite their differences, all of these interventions bear witness to a rising preoccupation with the social dislocations caused by a series of practices typically associated with the emergence of capitalism:16 ‘[r]ent rises, evictions, enclosure and engrossment, tenurial fixe and high prices’, inter alia (p 42). It is important to note, however, that many of these claims were not framed (yet) in the language of rights but rather in religious categories: after all, the common root of all problems was the ‘moral degeneracy’ of sinners (p 42). For these thinkers, ‘[w]ordly prosperity is among the fruits of the tree of commonwealth, but it has a perilous core that holds men in its thrall and makes them set their love hugely or greatly on things’ (p 42). This religious sentiment is also echoed, by and large, by the protagonists of chapter III: the peasant revolts that rocked early modern England in 1549 and 1607 (p 48). Under the rallying cry ‘from hensforth noman shall enclose any more,’17 these revolts took justice in their own hands—in the first case quite literally, with the creation of a peoples’ court under the shadow of an Oak tree aptly named the ‘tree of reformation’ (p 50). If, as Blomley and other critical legal geographers have argued, private property is first and foremost dependent on the creation of spatial and infrastructural devices to parcel common land,18 then it shouldn’t be surprising that these revolts began with the ‘throwing down of enclosures’ and its material components: ‘dead hedges constructed from interwoven branches (i.e) fences or living (“quick”) hedges made of growing trees’ (p 220). For this reason, those involved in these early revolts were named the ‘levellers’ or ‘diggers:’ a denigratory term due to its connections with manual labor and the ‘levelling’ of property barriers that was proudly taken act as a ‘confident self-description’ (p 59–60). Invoking an oft-cited biblical proverb, these groups wondered ‘when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a Gentleman?’ (p 45). While they were not able to return to the promised land of honey and milk before the corrupt fall of the greedy man due to their eventual military defeat, their syncretic legacy of Christian egalitarianism and rural agitation would inspire later other radicals in Britain and beyond. This is especially clear in chapter IV, where Marks reviews how the ‘true levellers’—a radical faction of the parliamentary coalition of the English Revolutions of the 17th century—advocated for the rights of man in the famous Putney debates (p 72). Held during the brutal English Civil War, these debates provided a forum for the reimagination (and contestation) of the future structures of constitutional government. Indeed, in their midst, important problematics (that still resonate to our days) were debated, such as religious tolerance, equality, and the powers of parliament.19 While the main issue of this event was the question of voting rights, the close relation between property and enfranchisement brought concerns of poverty and material disparity to the forefront. On the one hand, the more moderate parliamentary factions argued that only those who had a fixed interest in the affairs of the commonwealth could vote, suggesting that ‘franchise was a privilege that was necessarily linked to ownership of property’ (p 75). Giving all men (let alone women) the vote was anathema, as this entailed the denial of all property—if this was the case, ‘[w]hat was there to stop [voters] to abolish private ownership of property altogether?’ (p 76). On the other end, the ‘true levellers’ argued that no freeman had fought the civil war to ‘enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave’ (p 78, citing Walwyn). While the language used increasingly resembles more contemporary juridical discourse, its religious connotations still reign supreme. For Winstanley, among others, a fundamental principle of radical politics stemmed from the notion that ‘[the Christian g]od had made the earth “to be a common Treasury for all” ’ (p 83). For the same reason, it’s important to note that boundless jurisdictional imagination that was mobilized by these early radicals—their politics did not respond to our contemporary categories of ‘the local’ or ‘the national,’ and instead responded to early modern religious notions of zoning that ranged from the tiny parish to the whole of res publica christiana—or even humankind tout court—(p 94). Chapter V tackles the relationship between rights and ‘humanity’ as a category of entitlement in the background of the controversy in England related to the French Revolution (p 95). As I mentioned, Marks attempts to decenter the usual suspects (Paine and Burke) to instead focus two less known figures: the radical clergyman Hugh Priest and the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. This is not to say that Marks disregards these canonical figures, as she spends considerable space to discuss the centrality of ‘inheritance’ for Burke (p 102) and parliamentary social reform for Paine (p 1115). However, she puts their interventions in their broader context: the ‘last great period in British history of open debate about the fundamentals of civil government’ (p 6, citing Laski). A particularly enjoyable feature of this section is Marks’ painstaking knitting of textual sources and material culture through ‘everyday objects’ such as cartoons and paintings (p 6)–in her words, one cannot forget that ‘the war of words was also a war of images’ (p 118). The vivid religious allusions remind us of the centrality of spiritual considerations in these debates, which are often presumed to be entirely secular. Thus, Gilray’s cartoons—that depict Burke as a ‘Jesuitical inquisitor’ (footnote 26 at p 100) and Paine under the spell of a ‘bizarre demonic creature’ that sings the revolutionary song Ça Ira (p 111)—flesh out the theological underpinnings of western political thought well into the age of revolutions. Marks concludes that Price, Wollstonecraft and Paine all share a critique of the ‘persistence of feudal forms of inherited privilege’ and concerns about the material ‘conditions in which popular sovereignty would be realized’ (p 117). At the same time, she suggests that one cannot reduce all rights-talk to the towering figure of Paine without erasing alternative proposals that were particularly concerned with ‘[t]he division of property; immense wealth and squalid poverty; privilege linked to aristocratic descent, and both in turn linked to the accumulation of riches [… and] wage-slavery’ (p 120). The next chapter strives to map such approach, putting questions of dearth and famine at the forefront of political theory. As a counterpoint to both Burke and Paine, Marks suggests that Thelwall—a leading member of the radical London Corresponding Society—offers another perspective (p 143). After contextualizing the situation of widespread scarcity and anti-Jacobin repression in England at the turn of the 18th century, Marks’ shows that Thelwall and other radicals mobilized the notion of the moral economy (an idea which has also seen an important revival of historical interest after the crisis of 2008)20 to protect the poor from an increasingly brutal system of ‘free trade’ in grain (p 129). While many contemporaries dismissed their efforts—famously, Adam Smith compared these counter-conducts as superstitious acts of popular terror and witchcraft (p 131)—Marks stresses that these food riots increasingly conceptualized their plight around the language of rights—the right to live in particular (p 133). Indeed, Thelwall went even further raising even early claims to the ‘Rights of Labourers’ (p 146). Finally, it is well worth noting that Marks stresses the role of pioneer women in these public debates (while, at the same time, avoiding an uncritical celebration of their often conservative contributions). For example, Marks reviews the literary production of the ‘playwright poet, and prolific writer’ Hannah Moore (p 137). Writing in the same discoursive register of the ‘moral economy,’ Moore drafted moral tales that promoted the Christian virtues of ‘docility, piety, humility, and industriousness among ordinary people’ [and housewives in particular] (p 137). Instead of agitating for food riots, Moore stressed the role of the good mother and good wife as a fundamental pillar for the emergence of a Smithian ‘free’ market. As Marks aptly put it, her books purport ‘a project of patriarchal subordination, but also, and linked to that, an attempt to put a stop to enforcement of the moral economy, and enroll the poor in the new political economy’ (p 137). In chapters VII & VIII, Marks elegantly connects the loose threads of these previous traditions of radical thought into the crowning figure of Spence.21 In his work, we see how this plethora of preoccupations about enclosures, the moral economy, biblical entitlements over common property, the equality between men (and to a degree, between men and women), or the extension of the suffrage converged into the work of a mature radical thinker. Marks contextualizes Spence’s unusual trajectory: from his humble beginnings as a self-taught anti-enclosure activist in Newcastle Upon Tyne (p 176) to his—also humble—late career as a covert publicist in London’s underground radical taverns (p 202). His work resists any easy categorization—as Marks herself notes, ‘[h]is writing brings together a profusion of registers, discourses, and modes of argumentation—nativist and rationalist, secular and religious, utopian, republican, and millenarian’ (p 191). To put it briefly, his land reform program entailed ‘socializing ownership by vesting it in local communities (the parishes),’ while his social reform included the extension of the suffrage (to women, even) and a simplification of the English language to facilitate the alphabetization of the poor (p 180). For all of his flaws, Marks concludes that this model of anti-enclosure rights-talk might have a lesson for our own days, in which capital accumulation constantly creates new forms of enclosure and commodification at every front of social life (p 260). Indeed, as De Schutter & Rajagopal have argued, rebuilding the commons seems to be a promising strategy in our times of endless privatization of land (and everything else).22 However, as a reader, I was left craving a more incisive inquiry into the perils and promises of retrieving the religious inheritance of these radical visions of communing. While I can share many elements of the radical critique of Albion’s ‘Satanic Mills’ (p 151, citing Blake), I often felt uneasy with its theological underpinnings. One cannot forget that Spence’s proposal, however ahead of their times, were still grounded in a vision which tied human rights to ‘the fulfilment of the Levitican jubilee or promise of the millennium’ (p 208). While the radical underground could pray that ‘God [may] bless us one and all, and send the price of bread may fall’ (p 123), this language seems largely inadequate for our contemporary (allegedly) secular and multicultural polities. Instead of fatally wounding her argument, however, I suggest that this problem of religion makes Marks’ book an important, even if perhaps unexpected, contribution to the ever-growing debate on the Christian heritage of human rights. As recent scholarship has shown, ‘secularization’ is no silver bullet: the legacies of religious visions still pervade our contemporary categories of struggle—legal or otherwise.23 Marks’ retrieval of the English radical tradition shows a clear example of how, for both better and worse, human rights discourse still revolves around a problematic but perhaps unescapable imago dei.24 Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín PhD Student and Teaching Assistant. Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.25 Footnotes 1 Koskenniemi, ‘What Should International Legal History Become?’ in Roth-Isigkeit, Kleinlein and Kadelbach (eds), System, Order, and International Law: The Early History of International Legal Thought from Machiavelli to Hegel (2017) 381–97, at 381. 2 Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (2016); Beckert and Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (2019). 3 Flandreau, ‘Border Crossing,’ (2019) 1 Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, 1–9. 4 Ogle, ‘Time, Temporality and the History of Capitalism,’ (2019) 243 Past & Present, 312–27. 5 Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism,’ The American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (2016): 101–39; Biltoft, ‘Against Scholarly Enclosures: Reconsidering the Art and Economics of Review,’ (2019) 1 Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, 231–40. 6 “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” (2014) 101, 2 Journal of American History, 503–36. 505. On the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movements of the early millennium see Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (AK Press 2010), vii-xvii. 7 Quiroga-Villamarín, ‘Beyond Texts? Towards a Material Turn in the Theory and History of International Law’ (2021 forthcoming) Journal of the History of International Law. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718050-12340172. 8 See, for starters, Slotte and Halme-Tuomisaari (eds.), Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (2015). 9 Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2003). 10 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (2008). 11 Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010). 12 For example, Alston, (2013) 126 ‘Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights’ Harvard Law Review 2043. 13 Marks ‘Human Rights and Root Causes,’ (2011) 74 The Modern Law Review, 57–78; Marks, ‘Four Human Rights Myths,’ in Human Rights: Old Problems, New Possibilities, Kinley, Sadurski, and Walton eds (2013), 217–35; Moyn, ‘A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism,’ (2014) 77 Law and Contemporary Problems, 147–69. See also Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (2019). 14 Which is a disputed notion on its own terms. See further Quiroga-Villamarín, ‘Domains of Objects, Rituals of Truth: Mapping Intersections between International Legal History and the New Materialisms’ (2021 forthcoming) International Politics Reviews. Advance copy available online at doi.org/10.1057/s41312-020-00083-w 15 For an overview, Shortall and Steinmetz-Jenkins (eds), Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (2020). 16 To review the ‘transition debates’ in Marxist historiography goes beyond the scope of this book review. See further Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2017). 17 Here Marks is following the English spelling of its time. See (p 51). The term ‘Enclosure’ refers to the historical and legal process by which common lands where parceled out into private property through the early modern period in England. For a classic introduction that links these developments in Britain with later colonial reverberations throughout the world, see Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (2000). Marks also deals with this notion in chapter II ‘Enclosure and its Critics’, pp. 21–43. 18 Blomley, ‘Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges’ (2007) 18 Rural History 1–21. 19 Philip Baker, ed., The Putney Debates: The Levellers, new edition, (2018). 20 The journal Humanity has recently dedicated a special issue to this pertinent topic. For an introduction to the issue, see Adelman, ‘Introduction: The Moral Economy, The Careers of a Concept’ (2020) 11 Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 187–192. 21 Due to limitations of space, I will not fully sum chapters IX and X. While the former offers a very interesting analysis of the entanglements of natural environments (and trees in particular) with rights discourse in the Anglo-American imaginary, the latter concludes with some present snapshots of dispossession of the commons. 22 De Schutter and Rajagopal, eds., Property Rights from below: Commodification of Land and the Counter-Movement (2020). 23 Berman, ‘ “The Sacred Conspiracy”: Religion, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Internationalism,’ Leiden Journal of International Law 25, no. 1 (2012): 9–54; Moyn, Christian Human Rights (2015); Paz, ‘Religion, Secularism, and International Law,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, ed. Orford and Hoffmann (2016), 923–38; Koskenniemi, ‘International Law and Religion: No Stable Ground,’ in International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Koskenniemi, García-Salmones Rovira, and Amorosa (2017), 1–21; Quiroga-Villamarín, ‘ “An Atmosphere of Genuine Solidarity and Brotherhood”: Hernán Santa-Cruz and a Forgotten Latin American Contribution to Social Rights,’ Journal of the History of International Law 21, no. 1 (2019): 71–103; Lantigua, Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (2020); Shortall and Steinmetz-Jenkins (eds), Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (2020); Leonard Francis Taylor, Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Haskell and Slotte, eds., Christianity and International Law (forthcoming 2020); Quiroga-Villamarín ‘Vicarius Christi: Extraterritoriality, Pastoral Power, and the Critique of Secular International Law’ Leiden Journal of International Law (forthcoming 2021). 24 Nijman, ‘Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium,’ in International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Koskenniemi, García-Salmones Rovira, and Amorosa (2017), 87–110. 25 I thank Alejandro León-Marín, Angélica Cocomá, Andrew Clapham, Phil Saengkrai, and the editors of the HRLR for their helpful comments on this piece. The usual caveat applies. © The Author(s) [2021]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Susan Marks, A False Tree of Liberty: Human Rights in Radical Thought (Oxford University Press, New York, 2020, xiii + 277 pp, £60.00) ISBN 9780199675456 (hb)
JF - Human Rights Law Review
DO - 10.1093/hrlr/ngaa055
DA - 2021-02-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/susan-marks-a-false-tree-of-liberty-human-rights-in-radical-thought-IC0IJMFa3q
SP - 252
EP - 258
VL - 21
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -