The Birth of the Human Rights Debate (Eighteenth Century)

The chapter retraces the main stages in the evolution of the concept of human rights, focusing, in particular, on the eighteenth century. Within the framework of a renewed attention to civilizations and cultures dissimilar to that of the West, it was in fact the Enlightenment culture, as we know, that led to the maturation of this principle, through a series of discussions that only recently historiography has fully highlighted. The politicization process in eighteenth-century literature provides ample examples of the public dimension of eighteenth-century moral and historical debates on the existence of the fundamental rights of the individual. However, when the problem arose of how to guarantee their political exercise through democracy and their constitutionalization, the contradictions exploded dramatically. The recognition of rights to subjects hitherto devoid of juridical and political values (slaves and women, first and foremost) would have seriously endangered ceto’s privileges and structural social balances: risks that the Revolution would have had to take on, not always succeeding in addressing and/or overcoming.