Adam Etinson and Jiewuh Song chronicle how one academic profession reckoned with the concept at the core of human rights, as well as with some of its practices. Starting with a more global – if still largely transatlantic – moment of philosophical interpretation of rights at the time of the UDHR, Etinson and Song go on to show how Anglophone philosophers moved very recently to develop approaches to thinking about the international human rights movement.

During the period of Sasanian dominion (224–651 ce) the inhabitants of the Empire of Ērānšahr (“Realm of the Iranians”) were subject to a well-developed and efficient legal system, which was in force in all the provinces of the vast empire during the five centuries of this dynasty’s rule and remained relevant far into the Muslim era after the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. In the age that the chapter deals with, Iranian law had already developed across many centuries from its simple beginnings in a pastoral society in the first millennium bce, during which the first Zoroastrian precepts were formulated and customs established, to its most sophisticated known form in the legal system of the Sasanian state. Within this timespan, jurisprudence evolved into an advanced and complex discipline, which remained firmly based on Zoroastrian tenets, but became largely detached from theology particularly in the legal practice of the state courts in the Sasanian era.

Drawing together emerging domestic and regional reform struggles with wider geopolitical developments, this chapter explores a new way to think about the unfolding of rights history. Starting in the later nineteenth century, the forces encouraging growing intergovernmental contact and cooperation through multilateral agreements and codified law – technological and industrial changes, including the spread of ever more deadly weapons, the easing of transport and communications, expanding educational opportunities, and a growing reading public – drew likeminded female and male reformers together in spaces beyond borders through new patterns of transnational mobilizations and formal international organizations. Many local advocates pushing against the limitations of the natural rights traditions of liberal citizenship increasingly drew strength in numbers by transcending existing political arrangements and combining national, regional, and international advocacy.

If we expect that the world culture with the first written laws should give us the earliest instances of legal “rights,” we would be looking at Mesopotamia. At the outset, this looks promising, because the senses of legal and moral right pertaining in the relevant Sumerian and Akkadian terms have the same semantic basis as the Indo-European root which builds the English word “right”: Sum. si sa2, “to make straight, fair”; Akk. ešēru, “to go/be straight,” causative šutēšuru, “to provide justice.” Like Latin rectus, “ruled,” and Germanic riht, “just, good,” these Mesopotamian verbs married senses of normativity and fairness (whether in terms of justice, ethical correctness, or moral principle) to concepts of straightness and linearity. Conversely, any deviation from si sa2/ešēru implied straying from a straight path or from justice. So, we begin with the semantics in good order.

A study of the notion of rights in classical Greek thought naturally focuses on Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Plato’s ethics shows a much greater concern with people’s interests than with their rights. In Plato, too, these interests are identified with reference to the community as a whole; that is, it is the good of the community that comes first in order of justification. As Julia Annas remarks in her Introduction to Plato’s Republic, in Plato’s ideal city “all classes are protected in freely having and doing what is necessary for them best to fill their social role.” At the same time, Plato believes that interests justified in this way (that is, identified and determined with reference to their contribution to the common good) are people’s true interests: his politics and ethics are therefore paternalistic and illiberal. As such, they do not allow for a theory of subjective rights as morally or legally sanctioned entitlements that are concerned with the individual qua individual, independently of the contribution that they might make to the common good. Plato’s predecessors, for their part, had mainly focused on the relation between morality and self-interest and the potential conflict between the two.

The notion of right(s) is ubiquitous in Roman Republican writings and its meaning often ambiguous and varied; it includes the idea of justice, normative rules, as well as a wider legal order. Following the work of Michel Villey, who argued that the Romans did not have a concept of subjective rights, as this would have required associating the ideas of right and power, historians of political thought and philosophers of law have all agreed that the Romans did not have much (or anything) to contribute to the idea of subjective rights and focused on identifying its first developments in subsequent periods, ranging from the twelfth century down to the late medieval period.

Roland Burke presents the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993 as showcasing human rights language as the “decisively triumphant discourse of the post-Cold War era.” Human rights champions gathered in Vienna after the end of the Cold War to inaugurate what they anticipated would be a new order for human rights, comprised of the minimalist state, formal democratization, and individual freedoms, with some cursory mention of welfare and inclusive development. Jensen’s contention that the delegitimization of socioeconomic rights in international politics coincided with a narrowing of human rights, rather than its successful expansion as an international movement, crucially challenges the triumphant narrative that Burke recovers.

In crosscurrents of the shift away from an imperial world order surfaced another contentious debate over changing hierarchies within human rights: Were universal human rights primarily about socioeconomic rights (requiring states to strengthen social welfare and economic opportunity), or were they about the right of individuals to exercise their civil and political rights? In underscoring a need for histories of socioeconomic rights that account for interactions between civil, economic, political, and social rights over a long timespan, Steven L. B. Jensen questions the historical accuracy of too stark of a distinction. At the crossroads of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics, however, leaders of liberal democracies insisted that the political and civil rights of the individual were the most important in the universal package, while socialist states emphasized socioeconomic rights (the right to education, the right to work, the right to development) that could benefit individuals as part of their collective belonging, thus furthering the cause of the socialist revolution.

Stephen Angle and Marina Svensson assert that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, there was not a Chinese word that translates the concept of “rights.” They hold that even though the classical and postclassical Chinese talked about “privileges and powers,” they didn’t have ideas of rights that correspond to the modern Western senses: namely, those that correspond to duties, protect the individual person, or provide “antimajoritarian trumps on the general interest.” Even though rights talk was also relatively new to the West then, Angle and Svensson claim that rights were founded on the historical Western understanding of persons as autonomous individuals. In contrast, they hold that the Chinese view persons as always already bound up in roles and relationships which, instead of developing into rights that correlate with duties as in the West, remains as talk about “reciprocal responsibilities” in their theorizing about ethics and politics.

Arguing that the prioritization of a right (or a set of rights) over others was reflective, not only of Cold War tensions between East and West, but also of the power dynamics accompanying decolonization, Barbara Keys’s chapter on the hierarchies of rights sets the stage. The reordering of rights priorities has persisted even beyond the Cold War’s end, as ongoing battles about geopolitical positioning and the distribution of economic resources. Hierarchies constantly change in the evolution of rights.

If the history of human rights shows anything, it shows that claim-making has no predetermined agents, and this volume nods to the rights of the non-human in a chapter by Jim Davies, who analyzes what might be at stake in the recognition of artificial intelligence not just as an instrumental tool, but a rights-bearing claimant in its own right. Indeed, Davies pursues this possibility through an analogy with the rise of entitlements of non-human nature, especially non-human animals.

In its opening clause, the preamble to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts the strong affinity between the concepts of human dignity and human rights. “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” the declaration grandly begins, “is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Preambles are repositories of lofty rhetoric, but they are also expressions of shared values and basic ideological assumptions. The expansive political claims of the UDHR find justification in the idea of human dignity. Moreover, the Declaration itself helped to cement the place of dignity in the modern discourse of rights, and the importance of dignity as a source of moral justification remains a lively theme in explorations of the origins and normative basis for human rights claims. In the words of Jeremy Waldron, for instance, “Dignity is intimately connected with the idea of rights – as the ground of rights, the content of certain rights, and perhaps even the form and structure of rights.”

In Latin ius (like droit in French, diritto in Italian, Recht in German) can mean a whole body of normative rules, a legal order, as well as “right,” in the many senses of the English word. Early in the last century, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld proposed that English speakers resolve the ambiguity about the meaning of “right,” at least in precise legal language, by using the word “right” only where there was a correlative “duty” in another or others. If there was no correlative duty, but simply an absence of right in someone else (a “no-right”), Hohfeld preferred to say that the subject had a “privilege.” Hohfeld also proposed four other “fundamental legal categories”: “power” (another word that is sometimes encompassed in “right”), “immunity” (also sometimes encompassed in “right”), “liability,” and “disability,” categories that referred to the subject’s ability or lack thereof to change the first set of categories.

In August 1989, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Le Monde published an interview with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In that interview Thatcher, in France at the time as an honored guest of French President François Mitterrand, asserted that claims that the notion of subjective rights originated with the French Revolution, and specifically with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 1789, are nonsense. The socialist French Prime Minister Michel Rocard criticized Thatcher vocally, and her arrival at the bicentennial celebrations was met with jeers, yet many historians today would agree with her, whatever their preferred origin point(s) for a concept of subjective rights. What is more controversial is Thatcher’s alternative account of the origins of the notion of subjective rights: to her, they had been invented by the Greeks, and were already foundational to Athenian democracy.