文章
打破个人主义僵局
“为了能恰到好处地鼓舞人心,这样一部宣言必须在整体上大胆敢为,在具体执行上切实详尽。必须考虑到的是将要出现的种种可能性,而不是那些在我们眼前垂死的传统”,英国学者和政治家哈罗德·J·拉斯基(Harold J. Laski,1893—1950年)在文章《制定一部世界人权宣言》中写道。该文于1947年6月自伦敦寄出,用以答复联合国教科文组织人权哲学基础调研。节选如下。
哈罗德·约瑟夫·拉斯基
若要让这类文件具有持久的影响力和意义,最重要的是谨记过去的那些伟大宣言都是西方文明的特殊遗产,它们深深融入了新教资产阶级的传统,这一点本身就是中产阶级崛起的一个突出方面,虽然其表述呈现出普适性,但这种表述背后的实践努力很少触及中产以下阶层。
在大多数政治共同体中,“法律面前人人平等”对工人阶级的生活没有多大意义,对美国南方各州的黑人来说更是如此。英国工会1871年才实现“结社自由”;而法国,除了1848年的昙花一现,直到1884年才实现;德国直到俾斯麦时代的最后几年才实现,但也只是部分实现;美国则是通过1935年颁发的《国家劳资关系法》才得以真正实现,而该法本身目前在国会岌岌可危。这类伟大文件宣布的所有权利实际上都是对愿望的陈述,实现与否,取决于政治共同体的统治阶级如何看待这些愿望与他们决心维护的利益之间的关系。
此外,必须要记住,过去各种权利宣言的重点之一,是假定政治共同体中公民个人的自由和政府权力之间存在对立。对公民权利的构想不仅仅是从个人主义角度出发,还建立在政治层面上。
过去那些伟大文件的撰写者,他们无意识或半意识的假设产生了更深层的问题,即政府权力每加强一分,个人自由就会减少一分。像边沁(Bentham)的著名格言“每个人都是自己利益的最佳评判者”和“每个人必须且只能算作一个人”,其根据都在于亚当·斯密(Adam Smith)大力描述的社会组织模式:其中,在任何“单纯的自然自由体系”下,人们在经济生活中激烈竞争,每个人都受到“一只看不见的手的推动,去达到一个并非他本意想要达到的目的”,而这一目的,通过某种神秘的力量,有益于整个共同体。
即使有人辩称这种自由模式奏效过——至少是否立得住脚还很难说,但现在肯定是无效的。共同利益中的一些关键内容只能通过国家权力下的行动去实现,包括教育、住房、公共卫生、失业保障;依照西方文明先进社会共同体能接受的标准,若不行使政府权力,仅凭公民合作无法实现这些内容。只要经过仔细分析,就可以很清楚地看出,个人自由和政府权力之间非但不存在必要的对立,在某些社会生活领域中,后者还是前者的必要条件。对于无视这一事实的当代形势,任何权利声明都没有意义。
考虑到这些因素,联合国从个人主义角度制定一部“人权宣言”的任何尝试都难免会失败。在数量越来越多、活动范围越来越大的政治社会中,假定他们需要规划其社会和经济生活,这种宣言几乎没有什么权力可言。实际上,可以进一步说,如果这种宣言背后的假设强调的是个人主义,那么这份文件将被现在正面临深刻挑战的各项历史原则的捍卫者视为对新生活方式的一种威胁。这份文件意在通过共同机构和共同行为标准分开探索实现的共同目标,而不是将其统一起来,这也是这种宣言想要推动的目标。
事实上,除非这种宣言注意到政治社会之间存在重要的意识形态分歧,并充分考虑到这些分歧在个人和机构行为中的影响,否则不会有任何好处,而且还可能会有很大的损失。试图掩饰这些分歧就等于完全忽视它们可能导致社会主义社会(甚至是一个刚开始进行社会主义实验的社会)和资本主义社会在对以下事物采取的态度上产生的巨大变化,包括私有财产、民法和刑法、健康和教育服务、生存的可能性(无谋生责任的某年龄段人群)、艺术(实际上是最广泛意义的文化)在社会中的地位、传播消息和交流思想的方式、公民在生活中选择从事某种职业的途径、在从事的职业中获得晋升的条件,以及工会制度与经济生产过程的关系。
此外,马克思(Marx)曾说过“一个时代的统治思想始终都不过是统治阶级的思想”,这一结论恰如其分,很难忽视。由此可见,从历史上看,以往的“权利宣言”事实上都在尝试赋予权利特殊的神圣性,某些特定统治阶级在其控制的政治社会生活中的某一特定时刻,认为这些权利对该阶级成员具有特殊意义。毫无疑问,这些宣言往往甚至通常以普遍适用的形式撰写;也许甚至连它们对普遍状态的主张也能使它们在其预期有效的领域之外产生一种鼓舞人心的力量。但通常来说,在它们的适用过程中,这种普遍状态总是会变成一种特殊性,以尽可能地符合统治阶级眼中的利益,或者符合他们所认为的安全性让步的必要限制。
一部以这些前提和结论为基础、让全世界人民都可从中形成一项行动方案的国际人权宣言将成为有益的激励因素,促使人们认识到改革的必要性。长期拒绝改革有可能导致暴力革命与暴力反革命的频繁发生,更有甚者,可能产生很容易就具有全球内战性质的国际冲突。
为了能恰到好处地鼓舞人心,这样一部宣言必须在整体上大胆敢为,在具体执行上切实详尽。必须考虑到将要出现的种种可能性,而不是那些在我们眼前垂死的传统。如果制定的宣言缺乏诚意和准确性,或是试图在不可调和的社会行动原则之间寻求不稳定的妥协,那么不如不制定任何宣言。目前拟议的宣言,除非是在得到联合国会员国的坚定信任和尊重的情况下发布,否则弊大于利。
我们这样的一个时代,目睹过国际联盟的无能为力、对《凯洛格-白里安公约》的轻蔑漠视以及对国际法和惯例的粗暴违背,经历过将酷刑和大规模谋杀作为其制裁政策的野蛮暴政。我们这样的一个时代已承受不起像此次失败这样影响如此重大的另一次失败。宣言没有权利给不打算为实现希望筹备必要条件的人带去希望。倘若政治家再次破坏普通人认为的生而为人的自尊基础,那么这一文明将遭受一场难以幸免的灾难。
Harold Joseph Laski
It is of the first importance, if a document of this kind is to have lasting influence and significance, to remember that the Great Declarations of the past are a quite special heritage of Western civilization, that they are deeply involved in a Protestant bourgeois tradition, which is itself an outstanding aspect of the rise of the middle class to power, and that, though their expression is universal in its form, the attempts at realization which lie behind that expression have too rarely reached below the level of the middle class.
“Equality before the law” has not meant very much in the lives of the working class in most political communities, and still less to Negroes in the Southern states of the United States. “Freedom of Association” was achieved by trade unions in Great Britain only in 1871; in France, save for a brief interval in 1848, only in 1884; in Germany only in the last years of the Bismarckian era, and then but partially; and, in a real way, in the U.S.A. only with the National Labour Relations Act of 1935; this Act itself is now in serious jeopardy in Congress. All rights proclaimed in the great documents of this character are in fact statements of aspiration, the fulfilment of which is limited by the view taken by the ruling class of any political community of its relations to the security of interests they are determined to maintain.
It must be remembered, further, that one of the main emphases which have underlain past Declarations of Rights has been the presumed antagonism between the freedom of the individual citizen and the authority of the government in the political community. It is not merely that the rights of the citizens have been conceived in individualist terms, and upon the political plane. There is the deeper problem that has arisen from the unconscious, or half-conscious, assumption of those who wrote the great documents of the past that every addition to governmental power is a subtraction from individual freedom. Maxims like Bentham’s famous “each man is the best judge of his own interest” and that “each man must count as one and not more than one”, have their roots in that pattern of social organization so forcibly depicted by Adam Smith: in which, under any “simple system of natural liberty”, men competing fiercely with one another in economic life are led, each of them, “by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention”, and that end, by some mysterious alchemy, is the good of the whole community.
Even if it be argued – and it is at least doubtful whether it can be argued – that this liberal pattern was ever valid, it is certainly not valid today. There are vital elements in the common good which can only be achieved by action under the state-power – education, housing, public health, security against unemployment; these, at a standard acceptable to the community in an advanced society in Western civilization, cannot be achieved by any cooperation of citizens who do not exercise the authority of government. It becomes plain, on any close analysis, that so far from there being a necessary antagonism between individual freedom and governmental authority, there are areas of social life in which the second is the necessary condition of the first. No statement of rights could be relevant to the contemporary situation which ignored this fact. [...]
Ideological differences
In the light of such considerations as these, any attempt by the United Nations to formulate a Declaration of Human Rights in individualist terms would quite inevitably fail. It would have little authority in those political societies which are increasingly, both in number and in range of effort, assuming the need to plan their social and economic life. It is, indeed, legitimate to go further and say that if the assumptions behind such a Declaration were individualistic, the document would be regarded as a threat to a new way of life by the defenders of historic principles which are now subject to profound challenge. Its effect would be to separate, and not to unify, the groping towards common purposes achieved through common institutions and common standards of behaviour which it is the objective of such a Declaration to promote.
Nothing, in fact, is gained, and a great deal may be lost, unless a Declaration of this character notes the fact of important ideological differences between political societies and takes full account of their consequences in the behaviour both of persons and institutions. To attempt to gloss them over would be to ignore completely the immense changes they involve in the attitude that a socialist society, on the one hand, even a society beginning to embark on socialist experiment, and a capitalist society, on the other, is likely to take to things like private property, law, both civil and criminal, the services of health and education, the possibility of living, between certain ages, without the duty to earn a living, the place of the arts – of, indeed, culture in its widest sense – in the society, the methods of communicating news and ideas, the ways in which citizens adopt a vocation in life, the conditions of promotion in the vocation adopted, and the relation of trade unionism to the process of economic production. [...]
The weight of the ruling class
It is difficult, moreover, to avoid the conclusion that was aptly formulated by Marx when he said that “the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class”. From that conclusion it follows that, historically, previous Declarations of Rights have in fact been attempts to give special sanctity to rights which some given ruling class at some given time in the life of a political society it controlled felt to be of peculiar importance to the members of that class. It is no doubt true that they were often, even usually, written out in universal form; perhaps even their claim to the status of universality gave them a power of inspiration beyond the area in which they were intended to be effective. But it remains generally true that in their application, the status of universality was always reduced to a particularity made, so far as possible, to coincide with what a ruling class believed to be in its interest, or what it regarded as the necessary limits of safe concession. [...]
Towards a Declaration that is bold and concrete
An International Declaration of Human Rights which was based on these premises and built upon these conclusions, to which men and women all over the world might look for a programme of action, would be a valuable stimulus to the recognition of the need for reforms, any long denial of which is likely to result in violent revolution here, to violent counter revolution there, and perhaps, even more grimly, to international conflict which may easily assume the character of a global civil war.
To provide the appropriate inspiration, such a Declaration would have to be both bold in its general character and concrete in its detailed conduct. It would have to take account rather of the possibilities which are struggling to be born than of the traditions that are dying before our eyes. It would be better to have no Declaration than one that was half-hearted and lacking in precision, or one which sought an uneasy compromise between irreconcilable principles of social action. A Declaration such as is proposed would do more harm than good unless it was issued in the confident expectation that the members of the United Nations gave to it an unquestionable faith and respect.
An age like our own, which has seen the impotence of the League of Nations, the contemptuous disregard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the cynical violation of international law and customs, and has lived under the barbarous tyranny of regimes which made torture and wholesale murder the sanctions of their policy, cannot afford another failure of so supreme a significance as this failure would mean. They have no right to offer hope to mankind who are not prepared to organize the essential conditions without which it has no prospect of being fulfilled. The next betrayal by statesmen of what the common man regards as the basis of his self-respect as a human being will be the prelude to a disaster this civilization is unlikely to survive.
Photo: Boubeker Hamsi
Harold J. Laski
A British political scientist and academic, Harold J. Laski (1893-1950) was a prominent member of the British Labour Party. He taught at McGill University in Canada, Harvard University in the United States, and the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom. He was also the author of numerous books on democracy and socialism. Laski was one of UNESCO's most ardent and valued collaborators on several of its early projects.