Beyond National Sovereignty: The Post-World War II Birth of “Human Rights”

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without a single dissenting vote. The term “human rights” coalesced rapidly and unexpectedly. Samuel Moyn, a leading intellectual historian of human rights, observes that people now view universal human rights as part of a set of “conventional and enduring truths.” To the contrary, he asserts that “it was all rather new at the time.” Although historical and philosophical roots exist for the notion of rights, the early twentieth century witnessed little “human rights” discourse. Thus, this paper illuminates two evolutions—one political and the other religious—that helped set the stage for the birth of human rights in the aftermath of World War II. Politically, the failure of the “Westphalian order” to prevent the unimaginable suffering of “total war” broadened transnationalism beyond the quest for a balance of power between sovereign nation-states. On the religious side, rights advocates adapted principles drawn from prior debates to the mid-twentieth-century context, thereby contributing to the development and widespread embrace of the concept of inherent human dignity and the corresponding notion of inviolable and universal “human rights.”