Freedom House and the Meaning of Human Rights, 1970–89

This paper explores the activities of the pro-democracy and human rights advocacy group Freedom House from the 1970s to the end of the Cold War. A politically diverse group of Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie, founded Freedom House in 1941 to publicize the threat of totalitarianism and push for an American response. By the 1970s, the group had emerged, along with Amnesty International, as a key organization in the fight for human rights and against dictatorships around the globe, a prominence it retained through the end of the Cold War.
This paper has three goals. First, it seeks to examine some of the scholars and activists who made up Freedom House in the 1970s and 1980s. While its roots were bipartisan, the organization by these years had become home to a number of conservatives and neoconservatives, including Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol. Second, it will explore whether Freedom House directed its attention to certain kinds of human rights issues and pro-democracy movements more than others. For instance, was the organization – reflecting its scholars – more concerned with fighting the totalitarianism of the left than the totalitarianism of the right? Third, the paper will use the case study of Freedom House to examine whether a particular and peculiar definition of “human rights” emerged on the political right – among conservatives and neoconservatives – that rivaled, and differed from, the definition of human rights offered by the left and liberals.