Authors: Bobbio, Matteucci, Pasquino
Summary: The entry is divided into two sections. The first, treated in this summary, focuses on the problem of defining and guaranteeing human rights. The second surveys the chief international human-rights institutions, especially the United Nations.
The key text in the history of human rights is the Declaration of Human and Citizens' Rights passed by the French National Assembly in 1789. The Declaration proclaimed fundamental natural rights such as liberty, property, safety, and freedom from oppression. The French Declaration of Rights highlights conceptual and political problems with the concept of human rights. First, what is the relation between such a declaration and an actual constitution? Are the rights delineated in the Declaration of Rights abstract principles, or specific ideological principles aimed at subverting a particular constitutional order? Second, are such rights natural and thus serving to limit state sovereignty, or conventional and based on a contract among social and political agents, and thus not serving as any external limit on the state?
The entry then classifies human rights: civil rights relating to individuals, political rights relating to the liberal democratic state, and social rights relating to industrial society.