The Self-Evidence of Human Rights
The chapter is a comment on Lynn Hunt’s reconsideration, in the same volume, of a crucial moment in the history of human rights when in North America and in France for the first time a ‘self-evidence’ of certain rights of ‘all men’ was claimed in constitutional discourse and documents, and a fundamental shift occurred in the explanation of human rights from a religious framework towards a secular one. The first part of the comment is devoted to the drafting history of the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States and to the meaning of the claim to ‘self-evidence’ in the Declaration. In a second part, the author returns to Lynn Hunt’s analysis of the limitations of the actual enjoyment of rights in eighteenth-century North America and France. The third part of the comment deals with the importance, or rather unimportance, of the notion of the self-evidence of human rights in the present age. It is argued that the idea of self-evidence proclaimed in 1776 failed to find general recognition, so that we must search for a new credible foundation of universal human rights.