The Surprising New History of Human Rights

After taking a look at the traditional history of rights (Locke, Rousseau, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Civil War, civil rights, suffragettes, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights) I look at the history from two new and unique perspectives. Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia, argues that rather than being a product of the United Nations, human rights arose from the failure of the competing utopian projects of the US and USSR. While Lynn Hunt argues that the emergence of rights talk in the 18th century was the result of a surprising cultural trend: epistolary novels written by authors like Rousseau and read by people like Thomas Jefferson.

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Credits:

Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from

70’s strike photo by Paul Townsend:

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Sources:

Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia

Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights

Clapham, Andrew, Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction

Kenneth Cmiel, The Recent History of Human Rights, The American Historical Review