Samuel Moyn - A brief history of human rights

Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, examines the development of human rights.

About Samuel Moyn
"I am Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University."

Key Points

• The modern concept of the “Rights of Man” is born out of the French and American revolutions.
• The first declarations of rights founded new states, but then moved to rights of women, people of ethnic backgrounds and rights to work, health and basic income.
• In the 1960s and 1970s, international movements that demanded human rights rekindled socialist ideals.

The history of human rights is a drama with two acts. The first act, after the idea of human rights came about in moral philosophy books, is the act about revolution and revolutionary rights, and it is associated in the first instance with the Atlantic revolutions: the American in 1776 and the French in 1789. There’s just no doubt that rights were announced, and indeed they were announced as “natural” in the American case and “human” in the French. In fact, in English, it was due to the French Revolution that one of the instigators of the American Revolution really became one of the first to use the phrase “Rights of Man” when he translated some of the slogans of the French Revolution. If we just think for a minute about the nature of those originally revolutionary rights, we’ll see how different they were from later rights. First of all, they were deployed with a purpose. Their purpose was for people citing their human rights to justify the political renovation of their countries and their redefinition of the nature of their citizenship. In the American case, it was about secession from an empire and the creation of the first post-colonial nation. In the French case, it was about creating first a constitutional monarchy, and then a republic.