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By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

I examine the current movement for children's rights in the United States in terms of the history of child saving, and of the recent events concerning human rights. I stress the conflicts between the salvation and liberation of children, especially in the areas of education and justice. I also consider various approaches to children's rights to define the current movement, and review recent concerns so that I may clarify future needs and strategies.

This study revisits the place of the Holocaust and the French revolutionary tradition in the birth of international human rights law, with particular reference to the genesis of the Universal Declaration and European Convention. It argues against conceptualizing the drafting of the Universal Declaration as an exceptional moment of Holocaust remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the war, positing instead that the framers' silence on the Jewish identity of the victims of Nazi genocidal acts functioned as an instrument of consensus politics. The article also examines how figures on the French far right practiced their own form of consensus politics by recasting their counterrevolutionary corporatist agenda in the idiom of human rights. 

This paper explores various aspects of the problem of perspectivism in Max Weber’s sociology as a component of the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to examine the contribution, if any, of sociological thinking to the understanding of human rights. In this inquiry I am more concerned with the theoretical contribution to the analysis of relativism in relation to rights rather than with the sociological analysis of which empirical conditions do or do not promote political respect for the exercise of human rights.

Since when, how, and why have sociologists discussed human rights in their work? In which forms of theoretical and empirical inquiry have such investigations been conducted, and what are some of their consequences for the praxis of sociology as well as for our understanding of human rights? We focus on the manner in which sociologists have conceptualized human rights and approached the topic from a number of analytical perspectives. In general, human rights have only recently begun to move sociologists in any noteworthy degree. This paper traces the difficult birth of a sociology of human rights relative to the place of the notion of rights in the sociology of law. This paper also ponders on the enthusiastic turn towards human rights in more recent times and criticizes some the reasons for this generous embrace of human rights. This critique is intended to enable rather than impede a truly sociological sociology of (human) rights.

Contrary to current tendencies, the founders of sociology as a discipline regarded the sociology of law as an integral part of social theory. Law and its historical variations were treated by them as a constitutive component of social life. This can be demonstrated especially with regard to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. It also provides an opportunity to highlight the differences between these authors, not only in methodological but also in substantive terms. In the essay it is shown how both authors treated law in comparative and developmental perspectives and varied in assessing the role of penal law and human rights in the course of history. Connections to the current theoretical debate in Germany are also drawn.

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.

Although a thriving social science literature in citizenship has emerged in the past two decades, to date there exists neither a sociology of rights nor a sociology of human rights. Theoretical obstacles include the association of rights with the philosophical discourse of normativity, the abstraction of universalism, and the individualism attributed to rights-bearers. Parallel historical obstacles dating from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 include American exceptionalism and racism, cultural relativism, the institutional primacy of sovereignty, and the privileging of civil rights over socioeconomic rights. Except in the United States, today human rights discourse is the lingua franca of global struggles*; building a sociology of rights as a collective project is now imperative. This article unearths and reconstructs 60 years of political clashes, intellectual debates, and struggles for inclusion and recognition surrounding human rights and citizenship—much of which has been hidden from history (especially African American human rights movements). We introduce a nascent but uncoordinated social science attention to rights and develop criteria for a new sociology of rights. At the nexus of human rights and citizenship rights we identify the public good of a “right to have rights,” which expresses the institutional, social, and moral preconditions for human recognition and inclusion. The concept offers a promising avenue of social science inquiry.

This book is concerned with the history of the idea of human rights. It offers a fresh approach that puts aside familiar questions such as 'Where do human rights come from?' and 'When did human rights begin?' for the sake of looking into connections between debates about the rights of man and developments within the history of capitalism. The focus is on England, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, a heated controversy over the rights of man coincided with the final enclosure of common lands and the momentous changes associated with early industrialisation. Tracking back still further to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about dispossession, resistance and rights, the book reveals a forgotten tradition of thought about central issues in human rights, with profound implications for their prospects in the world today.

Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter--buttressed by FDR's "Four Freedoms" and the legacies of World War I--redefined human rights and America's vision for the world. 

By analyzing the interaction of ideas, individuals, and institutions that transformed American foreign policy--and Americans' view of themselves--Borgwardt illuminates the broader history of modern human rights, trade and the global economy, collective security, and international law. This book captures a lost vision of the American role in the world.