Content area
Full text
A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mary Ann Glendon (New York: Random House, 2001), 354 pp., $25.95 cloth.
The full story of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has never before been told. We have had personal reminiscences and learned discussions of aspects of its genesis and legacy, but nothing that has set this document in its full political and philosophical context. Mary Ann Glendon's new book is a vivid and compelling account, based on research from a wide array of archival materials, including Soviet documents disclosing the USSR's diplomatic strategy during the period when the Declaration was drafted.
It is also unabashedly a heroic story-and the heroine herself provides the title of the book. Eleanor Roosevelt's nightly prayer ended, Glendon tells us, with this invocation for divine help: "Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new" (p. 202).
That vision lay behind the complex political effort in which she played a fundamental part. Just as the Declaration of Independence informed the political structures that arose in the aftermath of the War of Independence, so the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would provide a moral foundation for different countries to build their own institutions and develop their own practices in this field.
No one could have missed the American side of this story, but Glendon does justice as well to the group of fascinating and intellectually gifted individuals from all over the world who worked in the small drafting alliance Roosevelt forged. There was the Canadian lawyer and United Nations official John P. Humphrey, who collected much of the documentation on which the drafting group relied. There was Rene Cassin, a French Jewish lawyer, veteran of the First World War and right-hand man to Charles de Gaulle in the Second. There was Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian philosopher and a student of Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger. There was Peng-chun Cheng, also a philosopher, student of John Dewey and Chinese ambassador to Turkey and Chile. Incisive comment and valuable support came from the...