Theology and the Basis of Human Rights

1986 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-378
Author(s):  
John A. Henley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Great Confidence ◽  
Specific Teaching

In the age of the Enlightenment men were inclined, despite their great confidence in human reason, to invoke the deity in support of ‘the rights of man and of the citizen’1 whereas theologians are nowadays somewhat hesitant in suggesting a possible theological basis for human rights.2 Whatever this may indicate about a more aggressive secularism and a more modest theology and church during much of the twentieth century, it will be the contention of this paper that those who drafted eighteenth century statements and declarations of human rights were closer to the truth about their basis. In support of this contention I shall argue, first, that the doubt which some philosophers have expressed about finding a sure foundation for human rights is quite justified and, second, that the purpose for which some theologians have recently offered a theological basis has therefore been unduly limited. Finally, however, and rather ironically, I shall demonstrate that the bases suggested by these theologians are far too grandiose and all embracing and that what is required is the quite specific teaching of eschatology, the theory of Christian hope.

Universalizing Dignity in the Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika LaVaque-Manty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
United Nations Declaration

This chapter traces some of the conceptual history from the late eighteenth century, when arguments about equal, intrinsic, and universal human dignity became politically important, to the mid-twentieth century, when the idea of universal human dignity was enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The chapter argues that this universalization process primarily took place in the nineteenth century, in political controversies around gender, race, and labor. The chapter argues that a particular Christian conception about the dignity of labor, expressed by Pope Leo XII, helped cement the value of inherent human dignity while at the same time weakening its more radical political potential.

scholarly journals Conceiving the Multitude: Eighteenth-Century Popular Riots and the Modern Language of Social Disorder

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Sánchez León
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Social Disorder ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Basic Features

SummaryThe image of the crowd as an irrational, spontaneous multitude is commonly related to the works of a first generation of social psychologists writing in the early twentieth century, yet its basic features can be found in conceptual innovations developed as early as the Enlightenment. This article focuses on a particular protest in eighteenth-century Spain in order to reflect on the transformation in the meaning of essential terms which occurred in the semantic field of disorder. The so-calledmotín de Esquilacheof 1766 forced the authorities to renew their discourse in order to deprive the movement of legitimacy, fostering semantic innovation. The redefinition of riot implied a process of conceptualization that not only stressed the protagonism of the disenfranchized but also altered a long-established tradition that linked riots to conspiracies and devised a new anthropology depicting the populace as a subject unable to produce ideas on its own.

scholarly journals Kartezjusz — Lyotard — Dukaj. „Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” jako propozycja oświecenia po uznaniu końca paradygmatu wielkich narracji

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 169-178
Author(s):  
Gerard Ronge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Canonical Texts

The paper explores the philosophical statements emerging from the plot of Jacek Dukaj’s science-fiction novel Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość [The Perfect Imperfection]. The argument of the article states that the Polish novel proposes a complete philosophical model of possible ways of imagining the future which is unique, yet fully coherent with the Enlightenment paradigm. After recapitulating the most important arguments of the mid-century’s discussion about the end of the grand narratives and brief recall of most canonical texts of the period of the Enlightenment, the author analyses ontological presuppositions hidden after the structure of the fictional world created by Dukaj. The novel appears to fully acknowledge the Cartesian dualistic model of the human being (which strongly separates its biological and mental roots) and sets plots in times when all biological limitations have been transgressed. Despite that, both optimistic scenarios of eighteenth-century utopians and catastrophic visions of twentieth-century sci-fi authors have never been fulfilled and the fictional world of the twenty-ninth century appears to be just the same as ours in its core, despite being totally different in terms of its phenomenological appearance.

Human Rights in Light of Childhood

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Children's Rights ◽  
Children’S Rights ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Child Centered ◽  
Postmodern Ethics ◽  
Rights Theories

AbstractThis essay argues that children's rights will adequately transform societies only when the very concept of “human rights” is reimagined in light of childhood. In this case, human rights would be understood as grounded, not in modernist ideas of autonomy, liberty, entitlement, or even agency, but in a postmodern circle of responsibility to one another. This “childist” interpretation of rights is constructed by examining various forms of child-centered ethical theory in Western history; their impacts on major human rights theories of the Enlightenment and today; alternative visions implied in twentieth century international children's rights agreements; new theoretical groundings arising out of postmodern ethics; and the possibility of human rights as truly including all humanity.

The Context

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Probability Estimation ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
In The Beginning

This chapter introduces the historical context that gives meaning to the contemporaneous developments in probability theory. It shows how one can only realize the true meaning of quantification by realizing how history set the context for the great number of mathematical developments. The period is defined as the “long century,” starting with the rise of the Enlightenment and lasting well into the age of the Industrial Revolution: roughly 1790 to 1920. Most of this relatively short chapter describes the main historical events that took place during the late-eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth century, and in the beginning of the twentieth century. This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book, in which those who invented probability theory and developed the methods of probability estimation will be examined within their historical context.

scholarly journals Hanswurst and Herr Ich: Subjection and Abjection in Enlightenment Censorship of the Comic Figure

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Jürs-Munby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Movement

The well-known ‘banishment’ of the popular comic figure Hanswurst from the German stage by Gottsched and the Neuber acting troupe in the early eighteenth century is usually read as part of the historical movement from improvised folk theatre to bourgeois literary theatre. In this article Karen Jürs-Munby goes beyond that received wisdom to discuss what kind of acting, what kind of body, and what kind of relationship between stage and audience were censored by banishing Hanswurst. Considering this censorship as part of the larger historical relationship between discourses on acting and the emergence of a modern self in the Enlightenment, she argues that the osmotic body and stage that Hanswurst stood for prevented the aesthetic mirroring relationship sought by eighteenth-century stage reformers in an increasing need for bourgeois self-representation. The Hanswurst banishment can be theorized with reference to Julia Kristeva as an abjection of grotesque acting – a form of acting whose political power to question the autonomous bourgeois subject was to be rediscovered by practitioners in the twentieth century. Karen Jürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University; she has published articles on theories and discourses of acting in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and recently translated Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre.

The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
European Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the historical problem of how to gain an understanding of the fundamental traits that were original to the Enlightenment. More specifically, it considers how the Enlightenment arose over the intellectual, political, and social life of eighteenth-century élites, so as to produce a cultural revolution that transformed European society. Franco Venturi interpreted the Enlightenment as the “history of a movement,” a movement of a political nature that was created by self-conscious intellectual minorities. The chapter considers Venturi's proposal to go back to a view of the Enlightenment as a movement and as a fundamental chapter in the new history of intellectuals. In particular, it discusses Venturi's project for a political history of the Enlightenment, his denunciation of scholars engaged in the social history of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of a new cultural history in the 1980s.

Historians and Philosophers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theology Of History ◽  
Reciprocal Influences ◽  
Double Nature ◽  
European Civilization

This chapter examines the peculiarity of the Enlightenment as a category in the history of Western culture by highlighting the important differences and points of contact and reciprocal influences between the views of the Enlightenment held by philosophers and those held by historians. It considers efforts in the twentieth century to analyze the “Enlightenment question,” which proved pivotal in the study of the rise of modern European civilization. It also discusses the double nature of the eighteenth-century epistemological paradigm, caught between history and philosophy, as well as its unique historiographical character. Finally, it shows how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment opposed a brand new philosophy of history to a centuries-old theology of history.

scholarly journals I diritti sociali: un percorso filosofico-giuridico

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Casadei
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Social State ◽  
European Unification ◽  
Institutional Space

The controversial notion of social rights is situated at the heart of the relations between some key categories in the philosophical-juridical lexicon, such as equality, solidarity, citizenship and social state. The book sets out by dealing with their genesis towards the end of the eighteenth century, with particular attention to the lines of argument of Thomas Paine, to go on to examine their development, their juridical configuration and the criticisms levelled at them during the twentieth century, before arriving at basic income theories, namely alternative proposals going beyond social rights (and the juridical-constitutional forms in which they came into being). Hence, the question is dealt with up to the context of globalization and the complicated processes of European unification, also in order to single out ways to relaunch democracy itself 'from the bottom'. The underlying idea is that social rights are legitimately «fundamental» and «human rights» and that to be due they need two structural conditions: to be conceived of as «indivisible», «interdependent» and «interconnected» with respect to other fundamental rights (as ratified by the Vienna Declaration of 1993) and to be rooted contextually within a social and institutional space which today necessarily has to be multilevel but which, at the same time, does not leave aside the states' power of regulation and implementation.

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

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