The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Charles Habib Malik, a key evangelising figure in the intellectual debate that defined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).When President Truman introduced Point Four ‘development’ in his 1949 Inaugural Speech, he spawned an American globalist mission with moral and economic dimensions. Point Four believed in an American exceptionalism that linked the idea of ‘development’ to the salvationist ideals codified in the budding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though it would be a decade or two before either ‘human rights’ or ‘development’ really gained steam as a globalist mission.
Whatever the motive behind his speech, Truman and the US government’s declared belief in the ‘good’ of this mission and belief that international law should be used to accomplish it – although appealing as a ‘self-evident good’ – had little theoretical or empirical justification. It was simply something that Truman presented as the right thing to do, and as early as 1955, African and South Asian countries were on board with the ‘development’ part of that equation, as indicated by the documents that emerged from the Bandung Conference.
