Nazism and Stalinism, not better theory, revived liberal natural rights

Evidence

To insist that manifest social inequalities and constraints were “unnatural” was in effect to invoke an alternative world—a mythical world—that was “natural” because in it freedom and equality prevailed. … What eventually resurrected the liberal idea of natural rights in the face of the vision of an essentially ruthless nature was not more effective theorization but Europe’s experience of its own horrors in the shape of Nazism and Stalinism in the first half of the twentieth century. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School material in the vault — Adorno/Horkheimer on barbarism resurrecting the demand for enlightenment’s moral content. — connects to: Classical Marxists always defended liberal democratic rights against the right — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 456; Existentialism directly fueled the rights movements of mid-century — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 889; Post-Nazi Germany needed fifty years of resocialization to acquire liberal political culture — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 24
• QUESTION: If liberal rights rest on a myth of nature, and the myth’s revival was contingent on specific 20th-century horrors, how portable is the human-rights project Asad elsewhere challenges?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 285