First published 1995 by Westview Press
Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 1995 Taylor & Francis
Parts of Chapter 6 were published previously in Health Costs of Social Degradation and Female Self-Mutilation in North America by Rhoda E. Howard. Kathleen E. Mahoney and Paul Mahoney, eds., Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Challenge. 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Howard, Rhoda E., 1948-
Human rights and the search for community / Rhoda E. Howard
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-2578-1 (he)ISBN 0-8133-2579-X (pbk.)
1. Human rights. 2. Community. I. Title.
JC571. H69 1995
323dc20 95-9269
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-2579-8 (pbk)
In Memoriam
Margarethe Kthe Hassmann Ehrenfried,
b. 1893 Leipzig, d. 1943 Sobibor
Guenther (Hassmann) Ehrenfried,
b. 1921 Berlin, d. 1941 Mauthausen
Ludwig Cohn,
b. ? Leipzig, d. 1952 Oslo, Norway
Ida Cohn,
b. 1882 Leipzig, d. 1942 Auschwitz
Lina-Gertrud Hassmann Cohn,
b. 1895 Germany, d. 1988 Oslo, Norway
Expelled from their community and denied all human rights
Many individuals and organizations have helped me in the preparation of this volume.
Several of my students assisted me in my research. From 1988 to 1994, Susan Dicklich, Lisa Kowalchuk, Ed Ezergailis, Glenn Brunetti, Dwayne Hodgson, Matthew McLean, and Patrick Reed diligently sought out sources, checked facts, read drafts, and put up with my general absentmindedness. I am deeply indebted to all of them.
From 1989 to 1991, I attended a seminar in Toronto on ethics and membership organized by Howard Adelman of York University. I am most grateful not only to him but also to my fellow participants in the seminar, especially Janet Ajzenstat, now of McMaster University; Joe Carens, Cranford Pratt, and Robert Vipond of the University of Toronto; and Peter Penz and Reg Whittaker of York University; for introducing me to material with which I had been unfamiliar and for allowing me a chance to air my views on individualism and community. I am also grateful to Iwona Irwin-Zarecka of Wilfrid Laurier University and Elaine Nardocchio of McMaster University for inviting me to present my conclusions to academic audiences in 1993.
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, now of Emory University; Ann Elizabeth Mayer of the Wharton School; and Norman Dubeski, David Hitchcock, Gary Madison, and Virginia Aksan very kindly read drafts of my work in progress. I am very thankful to all of them for their comments, as I am also to the anonymous publishers reviewers. Parts of my argument are results of conversations with Hurst Hannum of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and James Hathaway of Osgoode Hall, York University
Research for this volume was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, both through an individual grant to me and through a grant to the Ethics and Membership seminar group. In its final stages, research was sponsored by the Arts Research Board of McMaster University. I am very grateful to both the council and the university for their confidence in my work.
Parts of this volume have already been printed in somewhat different form elsewhere. I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to print a revised version of my article Cultural Absolutism and the Search for Community (Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2 [May 1993]: pp. 315-338). Pages 86-91 of are reprinted with revisions from my The African Debate on Human Rights: Group Versus Individual Identity, in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim and Francis Deng (eds.), Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990, pp. 159-183), and I am grateful to the Brookings Institution for its permission to do so. Finally, I am grateful to Kluwer Academic Publishers of Dordrecht, the Netherlands, for permission to reprint, in revised form, parts of my Health Costs of Social Degradation and Female Self-Mutilation in North America, in Kathleen E. Mahoney and Paul Mahoney (eds.), Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Challenge (1993), pp. 503-516.
I am, as always, extremely grateful to my close friend and colleague, Jack Donnelly. He patiently read through two complete drafts of this volume, giving me his usual brutal criticism and saving me from multifarious academic sins. He was also unfailingly available with moral support and encouragement. To have an academic companion on whom one can so consistently rely is a rare privilege.
My husband, Peter McCabe, and our son, Patrick McCabe, have once again suffered through endless worries and endless dinner-table conversations about my research. I am more grateful than I can convey to them both for their patience and their sense of humor. The quality of this work, such as it is, would be much diminished had I not had access to my husbands fine intellect, and had I not had to withstand his intolerance of cant.
On this fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, I dedicate this book to members of my paternal family persecuted by the Nazis. I dedicate it especially to my grandmother Gertrud Cohn, a German Christian twice married to Jews. Her first husband, my grandfather Bruno Hassmann, died for the Fatherland during World War I. In the 1930s, she refused the Nazi desire that Christians should divorce their Jewish husbands, and she escaped with Ludwig Cohn to Oslo. In Oslo, she refused an Embassy offer to admit her, but not her Jewish husband, to the United States. From 1942 to 1946, she faithfully awaited my step-grandfather, who survived Auschwitz. Like many of those who today inspire us with their dedication to human rights even in the most appalling circumstances, Gertrud Cohn was an ordinary woman who in extraordinary times never relinquished her human decency.
I alone am responsible for any errors or weaknesses in this book.
Rhoda E. Howard
