On the Spirit of Rights
Dan Edelstein
Abstract
This book argues that the history of human rights can be meaningfully extended from the present all the way back to the late medieval period. It further claims that the key question up until the Age of Revolutions was not whether or not all individuals possessed rights, but rather what happens to our rights when we enter into a political society. Our contemporary rights regime holds that we preserve human rights under all conditions. But in the period between the Wars of Religion and the late Enlightenment, most theorists argued that we had to either give up our rights, or transfer them to gov ... More
This book argues that the history of human rights can be meaningfully extended from the present all the way back to the late medieval period. It further claims that the key question up until the Age of Revolutions was not whether or not all individuals possessed rights, but rather what happens to our rights when we enter into a political society. Our contemporary rights regime holds that we preserve human rights under all conditions. But in the period between the Wars of Religion and the late Enlightenment, most theorists argued that we had to either give up our rights, or transfer them to government. I show in this book how, why, when, and where the “preservation regime” of rights imposed itself over its rivals. In conclusion, I demonstrate how this earlier history is relevant for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), by showing how the French Declarations of the Rights of Man (1789, 1793) were re-interpreted and repeated in the 150 years after their promulgation.
Keywords:
human rights,
French Revolution,
social naturalism,
natural law,
natural rights,
natural constitutionalism,
Enlightenment,
American Revolution,
Physiocracy,
Declaration of rights
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226588988 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226589039.001.0001 |
