The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era

The idea of human rights, that is the notion that anyone has a set of inviolable rights simply on grounds of being human regardless of legal status, origin or conviction for crimes, emerges as an idea of Humanism in the Early Modern period and becomes a position in the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment. The human rights movement emerged in the 1970s, especially from former socialists in eastern and Western Europe, with major contributions also from the United States and Latin America. The movement quickly jelled as social activism and political rhetoric in many nations put it high on the world agenda. By the twenty-first century. Moyn has argued, the human rights movement expanded beyond its original anti-totalitarianism to include numerous cause involving humanitarianism and social and economic development in the Third World. 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.