| This study undertakes a genealogy of crimes against humanity. It inquires into key historical transformations that preceded the official birth of crimes against humanity in positive international law at Nuremberg. The study brings to light changes in understandings of law, politics, and human being-together that accompany the articulation of crimes against humanity.; With the French Revolution, man displaces God as ground and measure of law and politics, leading to the articulation of crimes against humanity . The man who displaces God is 'natural man,' a man who is naturally good, and for whom the good is wholly natural. Through the trial of Louis XVI, the medieval tyrant, the ruler who oppresses his own people, becomes the criminal against humanity. The duty of rulers to God gives way to the sovereignty of the nation.; Key transformations in the international law governing war also lead to the articulation of crimes against humanity. First, war itself becomes a crime against humanity when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public law of Europe is dissolved into an abstract international law ostensibly encompassing the world. With this dissolution, the juridical category of the enemy (a category enabling mutual restraint in war) and the spatial character of law are lost. Second, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, humanitarian intervention appears as the potential exception to the prohibition against the use of force. The jurists who justify humanitarian intervention ground it in a law of humanity. This law of humanity protects the rights of men as men and is administered by civilized states on the basis of a solidarity grounded in sheer humanity. Third, the laws of war are transformed into 'humanitarian law' as charity (love of God) is replaced by humanity (love of man). Sympathy (suffering-with) emerges as the ground of a human solidarity.; Thus, the reduction of man to a 'natural' or 'mere' man emerges as the principal ground of the articulation of crimes against humanity. However, this reduction of man to a mere specimen of the species man (to a being whose essence is given by nature) also emerges as constitutive of the evil underlying crimes against humanity. |
