Abstract

This paper expresses the effort to reinterpret the history of the rights of man, and of human rights thereafter then (starting from 1948), from a non-Eurocentric perspective. This is a very specific project that naturally is not meant to retrace the phases of the Western history of rights, but neither is the point to compare the Western conception with those of other legal traditions, such as the Islamic one. In short, the attempt is not to read the history of the rights of man as a progression involving the recognition of increasingly large spheres of freedom carved out of the sovereignty of Western states (as Georg Jellinek saw it), nor is it to read that history as a slow and belated delimitation of national sovereignty in international relations since the end of World War II. To introduce a non-European perspective is instead to analyze the role of the Western conception in leading to the ascendancy of the West over other civilizations and cultures on the ground of the anthropological representation of a non-Western otherness.