Book Review: Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy, by Alexandre Lefebvre

• Date: 01 June 2015
• Author: Samuel Moyn
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715580071
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Political Theory 43(3)
Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy, by Alexandre
Lefebvre. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Reviewed by: Samuel Moyn, Harvard University
DOI: 10.1177/0090591715580071
Alexandre Lefebvre’s beautifully conceived book is a bid to revive the moral
philosophy of Henri Bergson, notably in The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion (1932), for our own age of human rights. As Lefebvre admits, the
venture is far from obvious. But this is not so much because human rights
remain the same endeavor as in Bergson’s lifetime mainly at the level abstract
norms, rather than that of institutional form. Instead, it is because Bergson
spoke about human rights even in the version in which he knew them—the
abstract principles for normally local and national politics that would none-
theless appeal to a form of human solidarity—very rarely. “Although Bergson
left us a series of tantalizing remarks on human rights,” Lefebvre acknowl-
edges, “they are, in truth, few and far between” (112).
Lefebvre proceeds undaunted, expounding Bergson’s distinction between
“closed” and “open” morality, and supposing that it is viable to adapt it to the
widespread contemporary normative commitment to human rights and even
to the novel institutional forms reflected in governmental and mobilizational
politics of our day. With a couple of noteworthy exceptions, Lefebvre spends
much more energy in appreciation of Bergson’s dualistic theory of morality,
even though it applies to a wide range of normative schemes, as Bergson
himself recognized. One might even say that Lefebvre’s book is much more
valuable for its Bergsonian revival than for its implications for human rights
either as the preferred universalism of many observers today or as a contro-
versially institutionalized political agenda. But Lefebvre’s application of
Bergson’s critique of “closed” morality and call for a supplementary “open”
one to human rights is thought-provoking too.
Bergson’s final book was notorious in his time but came so late in his
career—and with such a delay after the early years of his celebrity—as to
have been generally neglected over the decades since. Lefebvre revisits it in
an accessible and demotic style that suggests how easily a wide range of read-
ers (including students of very different philosophical traditions) would gain
from reading this book. Its first half spells out Bergson’s analysis of moral
theory, and engages human rights only to the extent that some of Bergson’s
targets, and most especially Emile Durkheim, adopted the far more general
approach that Lefebvre dubs “the picture of morality.”
On this account of ethics, our duties beyond the local have been escalating
over time...