On the Origin of Human Rights

Professor Dan Edelstein of Stanford University has written a fascinating new book tracing the intellectual history of human rights, titled On the Spirit of Rights.

In an interview with the Stanford Press, Edelstein described the deceptively unified-looking human rights discourse that originated centuries ago and is still relevant today.  Said Edelstein:

“I identify two types of traditions – the Anglo-American common law tradition and the continental natural law tradition. The first places great importance on criminal procedural rights within society, including the right to a trial by jury, the right against unlawful searches and seizures. These specifics are tied to the history of English common law and are not intrinsically part of natural law. For example, the right to trial by jury is ultimately about a certain right to liberty, but it’s a specific take on how we should retain that right.

The second tradition revolves around a belief that there is a sort of natural order of things. If a state and its economy are run according to natural law, then by extension, everyone living in that society would maintain their natural rights. Today, we would call that neoliberalism. This way of thinking can be traced back to the 4th-century Christian theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo, who was influential among 20th-century liberal economic thinkers.

By the late 18th century, both of these traditions have come to something kind of similar. They’re both issuing declarations of rights. The United States Bill of Rights and France’s Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were both created in 1789. The American and French revolutionaries see what they’re doing as fairly similar.

But I argue that although it looks like they are talking about the same things, they have a very different understanding of these rights. And I suspect these differences have been carried to the present as well.”

The book concludes with an analysis of the “archaeology” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, excavating the question of whether the Universal Declaration finally unified these two intellectual strands or simply papered over tensions that persist today.