The author argues the concept of human rights is a development of the older notion of natural rights and that the modern understanding of natural rights evolved in the context of the European struggle to legitimate its overseas empires. The French Revolution changed this by, in effect, linking human rights to the idea of citizenship. Human rights were thus tied not only to a specific ethical-legal code but also implicitly to a particular kind of political system, both of inescapably European (...) origin. In both cases, however, being employed was an underlying idea of universality whose origins are to be found in the Greek and Roman idea of a common law for all humanity. He ends by arguing that to defend human rights against its non-Western critics, one must be aware of the genealogy of the concept and then be prepared to endorse an essentially Western European understanding of the human. (shrink)

The story of how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since.

The story of how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since.

Few, if any, intellectual cultural and political movements—for the Enlightenment was all of those things—have proved to be so consistently contentious and lastingly influential yet so hard to defin...

This article traces the association between the European overseas empires and the concept of sovereignty, arguing that, ever since the days of Cicero—if not earlier—Europeans had clung to the idea that there was a close association between a people and the territory it happened to occupy. This made it necessary to think of an “empire” as a unity—an “immense body,” to use Tacitus’s phrase—that would embrace all its subjects under a single sovereign. By the end of the eighteenth century it (...) had become possible, in this way, to speak of “empires of liberty” that would operate for the ultimate benefit of all their “citizens,” freeing them from previous tyrannical rulers and bringing them under the protection of more benign regimes. In such empires sovereignty could only ever be, as it had become in Europe, undivided. The collapse of Europe's “first” empires in the Americas, however, was followed rapidly by Napoleon’s attempt to create a new kind of Empire in Europe. The ultimate, and costly, failure of this project led many, Benjamin Constant among them, to believe that the age of empires was now over and had been replaced by the age of commerce. But what in fact succeeded Napoleon was the modern European state system, which attempted not to replace empire by trade, as Constant had hoped, but to create a new kind of empire, one that sought to minimize domination and settlement, and to make a sharp distinction between imperial ruler and imperial subject. In this kind of empire, sovereignty could only be “divided.” Various kinds of divided rule were thus devised in the nineteenth century. Far, however, from being an improvement on the past, this ultimately resulted in—or at least contributed greatly to—the emergence of the largely fictional and inevitably unstable societies that after the final collapse of the European empires became the new states of the “developing world.”. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de reconstruire la représentation de la découverte de l'Amérique, dans la période qui va de 1492 à la parution de Kosmos par Alexander von Humboldt en 1855. Il s'agit de démontrer que ce que nous appelons la« découverte » de l'Amérique était perçu non seulement comme l'abordage d'un lieu jamais vu, mais surtout comme le premier repérage d'un lieu qui offrait un nouveau défi à la connaissance. Ce premier repérage allait transformer deux perspectives: le rapport à (...) l 'Antiquité et la vision européenne de l'espace et du temps. Après la découverte de l'Amérique, l'histoire de l'humanité devint une série d'inventions connectées au mouvement des êtres humains. À mesure que l'espace connu s'étendait, l'avenir se faisait de plus en plus imprévisible. (shrink)

The essays in this book are concerned with the intellectual development of the Spanish Empire in America from 1492 until Independence in the 1820s. The first section deals with the creation of a powerful language of natural law in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second explores the ways in which this was used to account for, and to deprecate, the cultures of the Native Americas. The final section traces the emergence of Enlightenment modes of approaching the subject of âe~Othersâe(tm), (...) both in Europe and the New World, and charts the emergence of a separate cultural identity among the creole population of the Americas. (shrink)