Toward a Post-Enlightenment Doctrine of Human Rights

The cry for rights arises in most nations. Systems of communication and international organizations, both voluntary and intergovernmental, send those cries throughout the world. Champions of human rights have trouble finding effective ways to act. It was the triumph of the Enlightenment that it enunciated human rights with an unprecedented power and universality. The Declaration of Independence is a good example of the faith of the Enlightenment. The horizontal limitation usually defines an in-group, geographically and socially cohesive, affirming itself in relation to outsiders. The New Testament declaration of the coming Kingdom of God renewed the same double theme. Occasional movements beginning in the Middle Ages related the religious vision of a transformed future to the pains of the lower social classes. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a commentary, both pathetic and sardonic, upon the high hopes of the Enlightenment.