4. Towards a History of Human Rights
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Abstract
A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Norberto Bobbio warned about human rights risking becoming an ideology. Nowadays, such a risk has fully materialized, as showed by the increasingly central role that ‘human rights idealism’ is assuming in the recent historical and philosophical debate. Intellectuals should be aware of this trend, in order to prevent human rights from becoming a label, an unassailable banner behind which no well-defined value actually exists. We believe that the whole topic can’t be understood without taking into account its historical dimension, and we discuss here the fast-growing research area of the history of human rights, as an introduction to a group of contributions related to the project of the portal ‘Natural Rights History’.
Keywords: Human Rights, History of Human Rights, Enlightenment, Natural Rights History
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