Benjamin Nathans, 4 Nov

The Russian History Seminar will hold its next meeting of the 2016-2017 academic year on Friday, November 4, 5:00pm-6:15pm in ICC 662 on the Georgetown University campus. Benjamin Nathans will present his paper, "Chain Reaction," the sixth chapter of his book manuscript, "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: A History of the Soviet Dissident Movement."

Ben Nathans is author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. Beyond the Pale has been translated into Russian (2007) and Hebrew (2013). Nathans has published articles on Habermas and the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, Russian-Jewish historiography, the state of the field of Russian and East European studies in Germany and the United States, the Soviet logician and rights activist Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin, and other topics. From 2008 to 2012 he worked as a consultant for Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a leading museum design firm. Nathans chaired an international committee of scholars that helped design the content for the Museum of Jewish History in Moscow, which opened in November 2012.

Nathans' current research explores the history of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism. It traces the paths by which Soviet dissidents found their way to the doctrine of inalienable rights—the world's first universal ideology—and employed rights doctrine in an attempt to place limits on the sovereignty of the Soviet state. How did "legalist" dissidents (pravozashchitniki) appropriate a tradition grounded in conceptions of the human personality antithetical to Soviet ideology and practice? Was the turn to human rights a symptom of the globalization of moral individualism, or did Soviet dissidents in effect reinvent human rights on their own and in their own terms? Even as rights have become the dominant moral language of our time, this project seeks to de-familiarize and de-naturalize them by studying them in the unlikely setting of "mature socialism." It aims, in other words, to give human rights a history.