On the Spirit of Rights (The Life of Ideas) - Softcover

Edelstein, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022679430X ISBN 13: 9780226794303

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2021

Synopsis

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?

In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and professor of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022679430X
• ISBN 13: 9780226794303
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 333