Abstract
A revolution may not necessarily take place in a few days, or months, or even years, but it can manifest itself in a very slow and prolonged manner. Such appears to be the nature of the judicial revolution, one of the most important developments of our global epoch. Almost unnoticed as a result, it is nonetheless of enormous significance for the emergence of the concept of Humanity. It is a truly consequential “happening,” deserving of the rubric revolution. 1
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Notes
Guénaël Mettraux, International Trials and the Ad Hoc Tribunals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46. This is an indispensable book for anyone concerned with our subject.
Cf. the splendid account by Christopher R. Browning, with a contribution by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942 (London: Arrow Books, 2004), especially page 316, the last paragraph.
Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 805.
Cf. Darryl Robinson, “Defining ‘Crimes against Humanity’ at the Rome Conference,” American Journal of International Law 93, no.1 (Jan. 1999): 43–57.
See George Packer, New Yorker, Oct. 9, 2006, 28.
For the strong view that the Armenian happening of 1915 was genocide and not a “mere” massacre, see the well-argued article by Roger W. Smith, Erik Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Prof essional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995). The most authoritative and in-depth treatment of the whole question, using a wide range of government documents and sources, appears to be by the Turkish historian Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), previously cited.
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
Also to be consulted in this context is Susan Maslan, “The Anti-Human: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, A translation of Les mots et les choses (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 386–87. As this quote shows, Foucault was aware of the historical emergence of the concept of man, which makes him a very appealing thinker. However, in my view, he erroneously thinks that this condition invalidates the effort to think in terms of man—now humanity—and of human rights. More recently, the always interesting intellectual historian,
John Gray, unthinkingly declares that “‘Humanity’ does not exist. There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgment” (quoted from his book, Stray Dogs, 2002, in New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 25, 2007, 20). While the last sentence is true in its way, it does not exclude the abstraction, humanity, though we can understand from whence Gray’s animus is derived.
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© 2009 Bruce Mazlish
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Mazlish, B. (2009). The Judicial Revolution. In: The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617766_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617766_4
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