Peng Chun Chang grounded UDHR universalism in intermingled, not sealed, civilisations

Evidence

Chang, who earned a PhD in the United States studying with the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, was committed to ensuring the declaration avoided metaphysical presuppositions and reflected both the diversity and the interpenetration of cultures and traditions. In a drafting meeting in June 1948, he drew attention to the influence of Chinese thought on Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Quesnay and Diderot, who had embraced China as a model of a moral order without superstition. Resisting the idea that ‘European civilisation’ was hermetically sealed, he told the drafters that ‘Chinese ideas had been intermingled with European thought and sentiment on human rights at the time when that subject had first been speculated upon in modern Europe.’ In articulating a vision of human rights that drew on diverse cultural traditions, Chang resisted civilisational hierarchies, pre-empting subsequent theorists who have depicted the universalism of human rights as a product of an ‘overlapping consensus’ between diverse political, religious and economic systems. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 101

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates what an ‘overlapping consensus’ version of human-rights universalism concretely looked like at the drafting table, via Chang’s Deweyan pragmatism.
• XREF: Directly prefigures Rawls’s later ‘overlapping consensus’ idea; connects to the chapter’s closing critique of such consensus talk as masking power relations.