"What makes the Universal Declaration an epochal document is first of all its global impetus and secondly the breadth of its claims, a commitment to a new social contract, binding on all the Governments of the world"
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Calling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "epochal" isn’t just praise; it’s a claim about scale and enforcement. John Charles Polanyi, a scientist who built a career on universal laws and reproducible standards, gravitates toward what makes the document feel less like moral poetry and more like a framework: its "global impetus" and the audacity of its "breadth". He’s spotlighting the Declaration’s most disruptive feature in 1948: it refuses to treat rights as a local custom or a national gift. It recasts them as something nearer to a baseline condition of modern governance.
The phrase "new social contract" does heavy lifting. Social contracts traditionally bind citizens and their state; Polanyi flips the direction outward, imagining a contract that binds states themselves. That subtext matters because it’s a rebuke to the old sovereignty shield - the idea that what happens within borders is nobody else’s business. After the Holocaust, after total war, that posture looked less like prudence and more like complicity.
Then comes his most pointed move: "binding on all the Governments of the world". The UDHR was not a treaty; it lacked hard legal teeth. Polanyi’s insistence reads as normative pressure, a scientist’s preference for clear obligations over aspirational language. He’s arguing that the Declaration’s power lies in creating a global yardstick that governments can be measured against, shamed by, and eventually litigated through. In his telling, the document’s radicalism isn’t that it describes human dignity; it’s that it dares to draft governments into a worldwide accountability regime.
The phrase "new social contract" does heavy lifting. Social contracts traditionally bind citizens and their state; Polanyi flips the direction outward, imagining a contract that binds states themselves. That subtext matters because it’s a rebuke to the old sovereignty shield - the idea that what happens within borders is nobody else’s business. After the Holocaust, after total war, that posture looked less like prudence and more like complicity.
Then comes his most pointed move: "binding on all the Governments of the world". The UDHR was not a treaty; it lacked hard legal teeth. Polanyi’s insistence reads as normative pressure, a scientist’s preference for clear obligations over aspirational language. He’s arguing that the Declaration’s power lies in creating a global yardstick that governments can be measured against, shamed by, and eventually litigated through. In his telling, the document’s radicalism isn’t that it describes human dignity; it’s that it dares to draft governments into a worldwide accountability regime.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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