Pragmatism and the Origins of Human Rights: The Case of William Ernest Hocking

Zubovich’s paper traces the connection between two bodies of thought that are rarely considered together: pragmatism and human rights. Zubovich investigates the ideological origins of the human rights debates of the 1940s through the writings and political work of Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking himself would take part in the creation of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, through his work in the Federal Council of Churches and his personal friendship with Charles Malik, a former student and chairman of the UNHRC. Hocking was a student of both William James and Josiah Royce, two figures usually portrayed as philosophical rivals. But Hocking inherited a philosophical disposition that both shared: a desire to reconcile Protestant theology with philosophical and scientific developments, and a desire to reconstruct the moral basis of international relations. Hocking became famous for his notion of “negative pragmatism” – that which does not work cannot be true – which he applied in his quest to develop a global ethics that could bridge cultural boundaries between the North Atlantic West, the Middle East, and East Asia. Like James and Royce, Hocking remained committed to philosophically vindicating Protestant Christianity. As a result, he became marginalized in his own philosophy department at Harvard by the 1930s, but his religiously-inflected pragmatism would continue to thrive in the liberal Protestant milieu for decades. Liberal Protestants' understanding of cross-cultural communication and human rights were shaped by Hocking's ideas. By carefully tracing the genealogy of human rights to their pragmatist roots, Zubovich reinterprets the relationship between religious institutions and the philosophical profession, and he offers a new account of the meaning of human rights in the WWII era.