Resumen de Human Rights in History: Civic Rights and ‘the Rights of Man’, the predecessors of Human Rights
The notion of human rights is intimately connected with the twentieth century, but civic rights, freedoms and liberties are much older. In fact, they can be traced to antiquity and continued with varying fortunes throughout centuries until the present. For most of Western history, they were either intimately linked with citizenship, popular sovereignty and various limits put on political power (i.e., provided rights and liberties only to the members of a given political community), or had religious or philosophic foundation that stressed human dignity, sameness of nature and brotherhood of all.
Sometimes both currents coincided, when Christianity in ancient Rome demanded autonomy in spiritual sphere; or when the medieval Church formed a powerful counterbalance to royal power; or when the notion of religious freedom (historically the first of human rights) emerged as a reaction to religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In other times, these currents developed separately, when the nascent liberal thought redefined natural law into law of nature and began to claim “rights of man” as opposed to narrow rights of Englishman, Dutchman or Frenchman. By abolition of estates and redefinition of the notion of the people (nation), the French Revolution made an important step in the development of the “rights of man and citizen.” Legal equality in time animated the movement for female suffrage. But the French Revolution also gave birth to modern nationalism and mass politics. Mass politics coupled with social Darwinism produced chauvinism, the most virulent form of nationalism. Coupled with dire exploitation during early stages of the industrial revolution, it produced communism.
A reaction to the devastating consequences of mass ideologies, fascism and communism, ultimately led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Is it, however, a sufficient means to protect us in the future from tyranny and abuse?
