Did the history of human rights begin decades, centuries or even millennia ago? What constitutes this history? And what can we really learn from 'the textbook narrative' - the unilinear, forward-looking tale of progress and inevitable triumph authored primarily by Western philosophers, politicians and activists? Does such a distinguishable entity as 'the history of human rights' even exist, or are efforts to read evidence in past events of the later 'evolution' of human rights mere ideology? This book explores these questions through a collective effort by scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology. Rather than entities with an absolute, predefined 'essence', this book conceptualizes human rights as open-ended and ambiguous. It taps into recent 'revisionist' debates and asks: what do we really know of the history of human rights?
Author(s): Pamela Slotte, Miia Halme-Tuomisaari
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2015
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF | TOC
Pages: 419
Tags: Human Rights; Human Rights History
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Foreword: history of human rights as political intervention in the present
Acknowledgements
1 | Revisiting the origins of human rights: introduction
Part I | Foundations: Antiquity to the Enlightenment
2 | Human rights in Antiquity? Revisiting anachronism and Roman law
3 | Medieval natural rights discourse
4 | Human rights and the Thomist tradition
Part II | Pluralities of discourses and rights: the Enlightenment and single-issue causes in the nineteenth century
5 | Revolutionary rights
6 | Giuseppe Mazzini in (and beyond) the history of human rights
7 | Constituting the imperial community: rights, common good and authority in Britain's Atlantic empire, 1607–1815
8 | Human rights discourse in women's rights conventions in the United States, 1848–70
9 | The peace movement and human rights
10 | Socialism and the language of rights: the origins and implications of economic rights
Part III | Institutional practices and relations of rights: towards the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
11 | André Mandelstam and the internationalization of human rights (1869–1949)
12 | From League of Nations Mandates to decolonization: a brief history of rights
13 | ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Christian internationalism, ecumenical voices and the quest for human rights
14 | Lobbying for relevance: American internationalists, French civil libertarians and the UDHR
15 | The Cold War and the rise of an American conception of human rights, 1945–8
16 | Afterword
Index
