While belief in the sanctity of human life has ancient precedents in many religions of the world, the idea of
human rights, that is, the notion that a human being has a set of inviolable rights simply on grounds of being human, began during the era of
renaissance humanism in the
early modern period. The
European wars of religion and the civil wars of seventeenth-century England gave rise to the philosophy of
liberalism and belief in human rights became a central concern of European intellectual culture during the eighteenth-century
Age of Enlightenment. These ideas of human rights lay at the core of the
American and
French Revolutions which occurred toward the end of that century. Democratic evolution through the nineteenth century paved the way for the advent of
universal suffrage in the twentieth century. Two world wars led to the creation of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The post-war era saw human rights movements for special interest groups such as
feminism and the
civil rights of African-Americans. The human rights of members of the
Soviet bloc emerged in the 1970s along with workers' rights in the West. The movement quickly jelled as social activism and political rhetoric in many nations put it high on the world agenda.
[1] By the 21st century, Moyn has argued, the human rights movement expanded beyond its original anti-totalitarianism to include numerous causes involving humanitarianism and social and economic development in the Developing World.
[2]
Some notions of
righteousness present in ancient law and religion is sometimes retrospectively included under the term "human rights". While
Enlightenment philosophers suggest a
secular social contract between the rulers and the ruled, ancient traditions derived similar conclusions from notions of
divine law, and, in
Hellenistic philosophy,
natural law.
