Prof. Dr. Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Der Riss in der Zeit. Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik (Suhrkamp, 2023, English translation forthcoming with Princeton UP) is an intellectual biography of Reinhart Koselleck and an exploration of the German historian's premise that twentieth-century catastrophic experiences of time require a new theory of history. His previous two books traced the afterlives of Enlightenment concepts and social practices (sociability, civil society, cosmopolitanism) in the long nineteenth century and their late twentieth-century resurgence. Currently, he is writing a new history of human rights. Together with Samuel Moyn, he is the editor of the Cambridge book series Human Rights in History.

Research Project

Human Rights: A modern History

During his stay in Munich, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann plans to finish writing his new history of human rights, in particular of human rights internationalism, from its imperial beginnings to its short-lived late twentieth-century global resurgence. While human rights seemed like a new global morality at the end of the Cold War, the recent backlash against the hegemony of political and economic (neo-)liberalism is often accompanied by a repudiation of human rights from authoritarian governments and Marxist or postcolonial critics alike. The legal frameworks developed for an international order post-World War II and after empire, which again underwent a substantial transformation in the 1980s and 90s, do not seem to provide mechanisms to deal with the social, political, economic, and ecological fallout of our unequal world. The wars in Ukraine or Gaza have further eroded the belief in the basic tenets of international law. The book therefore begins with the late twentieth-century liberal moment, in which human rights became a self-evident idea or doxa, for which not only historians began to invent a history, sometimes stretching back to antiquity, sometimes only to 1979. The following chapters discuss how rights were debated and allotted very differently in the modern era, especially during the shift from empire to a world of nation states, and again during the more recent transformation away from late twentieth-century internationalism towards global authoritarianism.