I'm not sure how to fully answer your question. Interpreting as "the right to exist," you'd look to Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jacques Rousseau. According to Kant's Perpetual Peace, a human being has the right to a spot on this planet because it is essentially impossible to exist without occupying space. Therefore, they have the right of hospitality, or refuge in a foreign land if displaced from their own. The concept of "hospitality" is older than the city-state, referenced in the Old Testament in the story of Jacob, for instance. You see it in the Iliad, too, when Paris' Trojan countrymen pass a treaty with the Greek Menelaus, which Paris immediately violates by absconding with the beautiful Helen. So "hospitality" was understood as a verbal agreement between two people to not impose on or harm the other.

Locke would bring in the concept of state as securing one's property, or the reason a human being willingly enters a covenant with their government. Carl Schmitt put it in Concept of the Political in 1976 that "Security is the cogito ergo sum of the state." The phrase cogito ergo sum comes from René Descartes in the 17th century, and means "I think, therefore I am." If the state can't provide the protections of the rights they promised, it has no right to power over the people.

Basically The 18th century was very much focused on the idea of man being a political animal. "Human rights" as a concept is pretty directly related to the value of a single life, as I've seen. The 19th century saw such improvements in medicine, sanitation, education, and equality that the individual value of a child was much higher, as well as the cost. Parents invested more in their children and expected them to live longer than, say, in the 12th century. I've seen good arguments based in that arena to set up the world for the human rights "waves" of the 20th century.

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer, because there's not really a consensus in the field. I'll describe a couple schools of thought.

One is the idea that human rights came out of the Age of Revolution, particularly the French Revolution and the Declaration of Rights of Man. Lynn Hunt's book on the topic (Inventing Human Rights) is a good one. In her construction, the birth of human rights was not just about the political moment of the French Revolution, but the cultural changes in the century or so leading up to it. She looks at the development of the novel, for example, and how middle-class culture evolved new ideas about/capacity for empathy. There was also a change in how people thought about bodies, and a move away from physical punishment--it's an argument connection to Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

The idea of human rights at the time of the French Revolution is different from modern conceptions in a few ways. If you look at the Declaration, the full title is "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen." That "Man" wasn't really a stand-in for "human"--rights at the time were limited by gender, and also race, which makes it hard to see them as human rights. Second, "citizen." Human rights today are rights that we have as humans, not as citizens of the France, the US, etc. While there is some universal language in the Declaration, it's also an idea about rights that's dependent on/restricted to the nation state.

Another idea of when human rights emerged is World War II. The Atlantic Charter, the beginning of the UN, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials--there's a whole combination of events and attitudes that kind of blossoms into the birth of human rights. Elizabeth Borgwardt's book A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights covers this from an American perspective. Something to note is that, for historians who place the emergence of human rights with World War II, it's NOT because of the Holocaust. The Nuremberg trials are part of what's happening in the aftermath of WWII, but (widespread) Holocaust awareness really didn't come into play until later.

Other scholars say that World War II is still to early for human rights, and that modern human rights really emerges around 1970. This is the time when more binding UN covenants about human rights (as opposed to the more aspirational declaration in 1948) came into effect. It's when NGOs that do a lot of human rights work--think Amnesty International--were founded. And on the level of the general public, human rights really wasn't on the people's radar until the 1970s--if you're American, the president that we'd associate with human rights is Jimmy Carter. Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia is part of the 1970s school-of-thought. To help explain why the 70s are different: If you compare the 1970s to the 1790s, in the 70s, human rights was more important that national sovereignty--the international community believes that it is acceptable/necessary to intervene in other countries when human rights abuses occur. That was NOT the general perspective at the time of the French Revolution. Even in the mid 40s, the idea that human rights trump national sovereignty was still very much in its infancy. This is partly an answer to your second question--before HUMAN rights, there were CITIZENSHIP rights--you had rights because you were American, not because you were human.

I would be interested to know how the concept of human rights developed in non western societies since they never had the age of enlightenment

To get to "Human Rights" as a concept in the modern world/modern international law you have to break out the two pieces separately. When did we begin to think of "humans" as a discreet and important category and when did we begin to think of certain natural "rights" as attaching on that basis.

It is basically a western concept as considered today and as such we don't need to go far east of Persia when we consider its historical antecedents.

Classical Greeks and Romans had rights, but they did not attach as the result of status as a human. Rather they would have attached as the result of status as a citizen or as a member of a particular social class. Slaves foreigners and those from whom citizenship had been stripped had no rights. This was a common view of many Pagan societies. The ancient Norse had the punishment outlawing an individual who had committed a crime placing him beyond the protection of all laws. In medieval societies it was common for certain rights to attach as the result of noble birth regardless of particular title or economic status. Nobility had the right to be executed in certain ways or had the right to challenge and be challenged to duels. So there we have rights but not human rights because they attach based on particular statuses not based on mere existence as a human.

While we have hints of the concept Universal Humanity throughout history and throughout every tradition of philosophy and thought, the particular strain of the concept that would evolve into human rights comes through Christianity. While stratified societies have always been Extant among Christians there's always been a strong theological argument that all humans are equal in the eyes and the Judgment of God. This evolved in various ways throughout the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East which led to the Renaissance and the enlightenment and all those other fun things which are discussed in other answers.

Then you get the combination of "certain humans have certain rights as a result of their status and others do not" and "All human beings are equal" and the result is "Certain rights attach to all humans regardless of status."

Hi, friends,

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