I have the happy task of reviewing two books that I genuinely admire: Alexandre Lefebvre's Human Rights and the Care of the Self and Brooke Ackerly's Just Responsibility. My aim is not to find fault with these compelling new approaches to human rights, but to faithfully summarize them and to ask honest questions about potential blind spots which become plain, in part, by putting these valuable works into conversation with one another.
In Human Rights and the Care of the Self, Lefebvre defends the daring claim that we humans ought to be interested in promoting human rights, not (only) because they are a framework for protecting others from rights violations, but because they are a valuable “tool for self-transformation and self-improvement for the sake of oneself” (9). To justify this unusual interpretation, Lefebvre capably travels through the history of political thought to show how five thinkers—Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri Bergson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Charles Malik—have addressed some of the major problems of their time by promoting human rights as a transformative way of life (4).
What qualifies as care of the self? Drawing on Foucault's late writings, Lefebvre argues that, first, its purpose must be self-transformation. This is not merely changing behavior to conform to laws, but rather “revolutioniz[ing] our ethos and way of being in the world.” Second, care of the self is a worthy end in itself; it is not “preparatory labor for care of others” (15). Third, care of the self is voluntary; it “presupposes the freedom and choice of the individual undertaking it” (16). Using these three criteria to select his authors, Lefebvre analyzes how they push back against pressing problems—chivalry, individualism, groupism, conformity, and materialism—by turning to human rights as a mode of self-transformation.
I cannot report Lefebvre's careful interpretation of each author, but I will draw out two key insights that cut across authors, on spirituality and virtue. First, through Tocqueville, Bergson, and Malik, he shows that human rights are useful for individuals’ spiritual well-being, moving beyond the typical sociopolitical purview of human rights.
Tocqueville, the French chronicler of American democracy, is wary of the spiritual and emotional deficiencies that democracy tends to produce, such as “envy, restlessness, chronic discontent, and loneliness” (65). He urges democrats to minimize these damaging feelings through civic engagement and the exercise of political rights. To do so is better for both the individual and the community, improving spiritual health and the quality of participation (73). Bergson, a French-Jewish philosopher, responds to “closed morality,” a product of evolution which exposes the human tendency to love our own groups more than others. Bergson argues that closed morality excludes many other “possible permutations of morality,” including truly “open love and joy” (95). Human rights are a springboard for “lov[ing] all others on the condition that we do not set out to love specific others” (103). Finally, Malik, a devout Christian from Lebanon, sought to justify human rights on their spiritual merits. To Malik, political and civil human rights protect the most meaningful spiritual freedoms, such as thinking and worshiping. He used subtle references to natural law in the early human rights documents to push back against the dangerous materialism that saw humans as nothing but a “bundle of biologically satisfiable needs” (147).
A second finding ties human rights to the development of personal virtue, in the writings of Wollstonecraft and Roosevelt. Wollstonecraft laments women's socially ascribed role of “helpmates and playmates for men” (35), and she relies upon human rights education to help women discern “which particular values and virtues to cultivate” as subjects of human rights (38). Similarly, Roosevelt admits to the fear which drove her as a young woman to conform to what her family and society expected of her. Pushing back, she argues that the freedoms of human rights help to cultivate a “spirit of adventure,” or an “attitude or disposition … in which we take in the world with interest and curiosity” (128). This is a version of care for the self, but it is also other oriented as “it can make other people come alive … tap[ping] into what is interesting and worthwhile in them” (129–30). Living freely, as a subject of human rights or with a spirit of adventure, is living a virtuous life.
These examples reveal Lefebvre's straightforward yet radical contribution: the pursuit of human rights is worthwhile for individuals’ own sakes. Addressing the often-ignored question, why should individuals adopt human rights? Lefebvre responds: because they are good for us. Resisting “magical thinking,” or the common assumption that, “upon learning what human rights are and do, people will immediately want to embrace them as a way of life,” Lefebvre shows that human rights are persuasive because of their “link … to motivations that are meaningful to people in their everyday lives” (176).
Acknowledging the dismissive counterargument of “First World problems,” Lefebvre insists that care of the self is not inherently privileged or self-centered (165). Instead, care for the self and care for the world happen together. Against secondary literature that sees care for the self as valuable only insofar as it leads to stronger democracies (cf. Ella Myers), he argues that better democracy and better selves emerge simultaneously (49–52). Moreover, drawing on human rights education and humanitarian aid, Lefebvre shows that other-oriented work on human rights can positively transform the selves who undertake it (167–81).
In sum, human rights as care for the self is a valuable new (yet old) interpretation of human rights. The idea shows why human rights should matter even for those whose rights are guaranteed by a well-functioning state. Rather than allowing relatively privileged people to perceive human rights as appropriate only for the “less fortunate and potentially far away others,” the care of the self framework shows that “anyone and everyone becomes the addressee of human rights” (194).
Ackerly's project is very different from Lefebvre's. Where Lefebvre works his way through historical political thought, Ackerly produces a grounded normative theory based on empirical research with women's human rights activists. Where he supports transformation of the self for its own sake, she promotes the transformation of society for the sake of global justice. I will summarize Ackerly on her own terms before returning to evaluate the two works.
Just Responsibility asks, “what should we do?” in response to overwhelming, interconnected, structural, and even invisible injustices. In Ackerly's view, this is not a question about individual moral obligations. It is inherently political, rasing questions about who we are and how we should pursue justice as a political community (x–xii). At a meta-level, Ackerly describes the kinds of problems she wants us to see and the methodology that we ought to use. Then she illustrates her recommendations with empirical analysis of concrete injustices and activism, producing her grounded theory of human rights as just responsibility. While certainly a work of political thought, engaging theorists as varied as Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt, Audre Lorde, and Iris Marion Young, Just Responsibility is much more than that. It is a handbook for political action that shows us how we can take responsibility for injustices which we have all contributed to, consciously or not.
In response to her motivating question, Ackerly offers the experience-based or “grounded” normative theory of just responsibility: “a human rights approach to taking responsibility for injustice itself in ways that transform power inequalities by connecting those taking responsibility to each other” (26). Ackerly explains this theory iteratively, defining and redefining it through normative argumentation and empirical analysis and, importantly, where those two enterprises converge. The iterations emerge across the book's three sections—problem, methodology, and solution.
Ackerly cites Mill on the problem, injustice itself: “the great error of reformers and philanthropists … [is] to nibble at the consequences of unjust power, instead of redressing the injustice itself” (71). This error occurs easily enough, as social epistemologies make injustice itself very difficult to see. Ackerly's vivid example of the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh illustrates one aspect of this troubling phenomenon, termed “complex causality.” The owner built a factory with neither a proper license nor government oversight. Designers and the construction company collaborated on an unsafe structure, then inspectors and police failed to enforce legal codes. These individual actors were all partly responsible for the tragic death of 1,134 Bangladeshis; however, their actions were performed within “unclear lines of accountability” which were “arguably causal forces.” Individuals, therefore, are not only “acting within structural injustice but in fact participating in the construction of structural injustice” (83–84). The causality is, indeed, overwhelmingly complex. How should a community respond?
Given the limits of our epistemologies, Ackerly argues that “we need to devise methodologies for perceiving injustice itself, even when it is partly concealed by the same social epistemologies and cognitive limitations that sustain it” (117). Ackerly recommends the use of “feminist grounded normative theory” based on activists’ political struggles (133), building on her previous work on critical feminist methods (Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism [Cambridge University Press, 2000]; Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference [Cambridge University Press, 2008]). The methodology entails undertaking deliberative inquiry of a broad range of experiences, skeptically scrutinizing power relations, and adopting dispositions of compassion towards others, all according to a community's own provisional guiding criteria.
To analyze how women's human rights activists take political responsibility for injustice itself, Ackerly studies the grant applications of 125 grantees of the Global Fund for Women, working on the issue areas of political participation, violence, and economic justice. Through a “donor-activist-scholar” partnership, she explores questions that the grantees themselves are interested in, such as how to “transform social, economic, and political norms” and how to develop “research and evaluation that could document and … bring about global change” (172).
Ackerly identifies ten common strategies that these groups use to take on injustice itself. The strategies reflect five normative “principles-in-practice” that we—scholars, activists, everyday citizens—can use to overcome the limitations of our social epistemologies to act with political responsibility: using intersectional analysis on varied forces of oppression; making cross-issue connections; building capacities for self- and group-advocacy; building community through connected activism; and committing to continual learning (194–202). Ackerly goes deep into the work of one grantee, the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS), to illustrate the five principles-in-practice. For example, BCWS's office provides not only legal help with labor rights, but also weekly visits from a nurse and free childcare for their clients (195).
In my view, the main contributions of Just Responsibility are the methodology that Ackerly articulates and illustrates; the practical nature of her conclusions; and her distillation of the construction and maintenance of social epistemologies. These strengths, in turn, point to two questions that arise for me in Lefebvre's work. He notes the importance of gaining a critical distance from one's own society. But how does one gain such distance; and perhaps more importantly, who is able to attain it?
For example, Tocqueville gains his critical distance by virtue of being an outsider, writing about America for a French audience (73). The very fact of his travels signifies some level of education and status that enabled him to comment upon the democratic experiment. Drawing on Ackerly's analysis, I would argue that these same elements produce a social epistemology that makes it difficult for him to see that, contrary to the spirit of his idea that Americans have “disseminated the idea and practice of civil and political rights down ‘to the least of [their] citizens’” (66), they have actually drawn sharp, exclusionary boundaries around who can be a citizen. His “human rights” (which Lefebvre concedes are political and civil) exclude enslaved men and women, free women, indigenous peoples, and many immigrants.
Tocqueville is a product of his time, and it is not fair to hold him to twenty-first-century standards of inclusivity. However, it is worth noting that his travel companion, Gustave de Beaumont, writes much more sharply about slavery and racial prejudice (Mark Noll, “Tocqueville's America, Beaumont's Slavery, and the United States in 1831–32,” American Political Thought 3, no. 2 [2014]). Beaumont demonstrates that it is possible to escape the limits of one's own social epistemology in order to see injustice itself, but that escape requires a conscious targeting of forces of oppression. Thus, I would recommend that as we consider the idea of human rights as a source of self-transformation, we use Ackerly's promotion of intersectionality to think about how some groups face steeper obstacles as they try to transform themselves. A logical next step is to consider not only Beaumont, but also former slaves such as Frederick Douglass, who had plenty to say about human rights and self-transformation. Lefebvre's thinkers by no means had easy lives (e.g., Bergson tragically died under Nazi occupation); still, some aspects of their thought might belie the difficulty of self-transformation for some groups relative to others.
As I have noted, Ackerly's work is strong on methodology; however, it is less convincing when it comes to motivation. Her argument regarding our complicity in injustice itself is persuasive to those who are already on fire for social justice. But how might her work speak to, for example, an American who is swayed by the doctrine “America first”? With her avalanche of examples and her references to contemporary political culture such as “clicktivism” (23; also referenced by Lefebvre, 59), Ackerly wants to be relevant for our current politics. I worry, however, that she might be relying on Lefebvre's “magical thinking”—the assumption that human rights, properly explained, will be irresistible. How can we convince a proponent of “America first” that global justice is important? Lefebvre's route is an emphasis upon the ways in which human rights as a way of life can transform any life for the better (193). Given that such self-transformation occurs simultaneously with world transformation, such a move might also lead to increased global justice.
Both Ackerly and Lefebvre are careful to note that each of their approaches to human rights is just one of many possible interpretations. I find both to be valuable, and all the more so when read in light of each other.
