Beyond National Sovereignty: The Post-World War II Birth of “Human Rights”

Abstract

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without a single dissenting vote. The term “human rights” coalesced rapidly and unexpectedly. Samuel Moyn, a leading intellectual historian of human rights, observes that people now view universal human rights as part of a set of “conventional and enduring truths.” To the contrary, he asserts that “it was all rather new at the time.” Although historical and philosophical roots exist for the notion of rights, the early twentieth century witnessed little “human rights” discourse. Thus, this paper illuminates two evolutions—one political and the other religious—that helped set the stage for the birth of human rights in the aftermath of World War II. Politically, the failure of the “Westphalian order” to prevent the unimaginable suffering of “total war” broadened transnationalism beyond the quest for a balance of power between sovereign nation-states. On the religious side, rights advocates adapted principles drawn from prior debates to the mid-twentieth-century context, thereby contributing to the development and widespread embrace of the concept of inherent human dignity and the corresponding notion of inviolable and universal “human rights.”

1. Introduction

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This document, akin to the scriptures of the modern human rights movement, has had a profound impact on international politics and humanitarianism. It set the stage for the creation of two major rights instruments in 1966: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These two covenants, along with the UDHR, comprise the “International Bill of Rights.” Additionally, the UDHR influenced the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, Louis Henkin (2000, p. 12), a scholar of international law and human rights, identifies the UDHR as “the first instrument of international human rights,” and describes it as “the authoritative articulation of the international human rights standards: the symbol, the representation, the scriptures.”

Remarkably, despite wide divergence on core philosophical and ideological issues, none of the 58 UN member nations, as of 1948, voted against the declaration, although six Soviet Bloc countries (concerned that the Declaration undermined the status of the state), Saudi Arabia (opposed to religious freedom), and South Africa (opposed to racial equality) formally abstained. Surprisingly, the term “human rights” coalesced rapidly and unexpectedly, as if it had emerged out of thin air. Samuel Moyn (2015, p. 2), a leading intellectual historian of human rights, observes, “people now treat such affirmations, and especially the notion that human dignity provides the foundation for universal human rights, as a set of conventional and enduring truths. Yet it was all rather new at the time.” Although historical and philosophical roots exist for the notion of universal and inherent rights (e.g., “natural law,” “natural rights,” “the rights of man,” and human “dignity”), the period preceding the UDHR witnessed little discourse on “human rights.” As such, the historian Mark Mazower (2004, p. 379) remarks that “not even groups like the National Council for Civil Liberties or the French League for the Rights of Man were much concerned with human rights in the broad [or universal] sense” during the interwar period.

This paper illuminates a pair of crucial factors that laid the foundation for the rapid rise of human rights in the post-World War II era. Two evolutions, one political and the other religious, set the stage for ideological and legal innovation. On the political front, governments gained a broader understanding of their responsibilities and those of transnational bodies in protecting individuals and minority communities. The failure of the global order to prevent the unimaginable suffering of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the mass destruction of civilian populations (including, most prominently, the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people that would come to be known as the Holocaust1) galvanized the political will to amend the implicit Westphalian notion that human welfare should result, not from government provision or humanitarian interventions in the affairs of another country, but from a balance of power between sovereign nation-states. On the religious side, rights advocates adapted principles drawn from prior theological and ideological debates to the mid-twentieth-century context, thereby contributing to the development and widespread embrace of the concept of inherent human dignity and the corresponding notion of inviolable and universal “human rights.”

2. National Sovereignty

The nation-state is a relatively late political construct. Historians identify the 1648 Peace of Westphalia as a key marker of the decline of supranational authority (e.g., the Holy Roman Empire) and the rise of an international political order predicated on independent self-governing states.2 Central to the modern idea of the nation-state is the doctrine of national sovereignty. To critics, national sovereignty serves as a cover or excuse for states to act with impunity domestically (e.g., suppressing workers’ movements) and, ironically, even internationally (e.g., colonialism). Though these criticisms are often valid, sovereign nations have been and are viewed earnestly as a central pillar of a peaceful and prosperous world. The Treaty of Munster, one of the two documents that constitute the Treaty of Westphalia, describes a “good and faithful neighborhood” of powers as an essential component of peace. With this political doctrine, European powers had hoped to put the deprivations and instability of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) behind them. Similarly, the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) and the subsequent “Concert of Europe” looked to sovereign nations balancing each other to foster a pacific order. Vienna aimed to bring peace and stability to a continent racked by the tumult and violence of the French Revolution (1789–99) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15).

The Westphalian neighborhood and the ideas of the Concert of Vienna—if not the minimal and short-lived use of its treaty mechanisms—grew to occupy a hegemonic ideological position by the early twentieth century. The Westphalian order’s endurance resulted partly from the Congress of Vienna’s contribution to a century of relative peace in Europe. However, the Viennese peace faltered in two ways in the first half of the twentieth century. First, it neither prevented war nor minimized the catastrophic impact of modern warfare. World War I, for instance, endured much longer than contemporaries thought possible, and estimates suggest that Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain lost a combined seven million combatants (MacMillan 2002, p. xxvi). Second, a myopic interest in the sovereignty and territory of (European) nation-states frequently came at the expense of communities and citizens within or under the authority of those nation-states. The attempted erasure of First Nations peoples in the Americas, the oppressive and extractive European colonization of Global South peoples, and industrial labor conditions are three such prominent cases.

3. An Evolving Conception of the State

3.1. Seeds of Political Change

Among the power players negotiating the post-World War I peace, Woodrow Wilson had the most ambitious vision of an enhanced system of international relations. He famously proposed the League of Nations, whose covenant was the first section of the Treaty of Versailles. As significant as this innovation was in setting the stage for the United Nations, it suffered from being both too bold and too timid. On the one hand, the League of Nations began in a weak position due to concerns over its encroachment on national sovereignty. The tenth article of the League of Nations was a difficult pill to swallow for proponents of national sovereignty. It declared:

The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.

(League of Nations 1920)

In other words, if a member of the League were attacked, other members could find themselves under “obligation” to respond militarily, regardless of their own legal and political processes for declaring war. Many feared that the League’s Council, not the sovereign members’ own governments, would hold the final authority in the grave matters of declaring and prosecuting war. For this reason, the U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles by a vote of 55 to 39. Thus, the most influential advocate of the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson, could not persuade his own country to join.

On the other hand, the League did not go far enough. It maintained an almost singular interest in peace and the balance of power between sovereign nation-states. Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” primarily addressed territorial disputes and international security among nation-states. Points six through thirteen, a majority of the fourteen points, sought to resolve specific territorial questions. Of the remaining six points, five treated general provisions of international peace. The final or fourteenth point, the proposal for the League of Nations, focused on the “political independence and territorial integrity” of “states” (Wilson 1918). Moreover, the preamble to the League’s covenant has strong notes of state-centrism:

THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES,

In order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security

by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war,

by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations,

by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and

by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another,

Agree to this Covenant of the League of Nations.

(League of Nations 1920)

The text calls for “international co-operation,” “just and honourable relations between nations,” and “respect for treaty obligations” among “organized” peoples. The preamble does not address the rights, duties, security, or justice of individuals or minority communities. To the extent that sub-national entities (i.e., individuals, the family, minority groups, religious organizations, voluntary associations, etc.) are a factor, they are so only implicitly. Furthermore, among the twenty-six articles of the Covenant, only two of the final four (Articles 23 and 25) focus on humanitarian issues.

This is to say that the war’s length, international scope, and immense destruction did not lead to a significant modification of the global order. Perhaps, by singling out Germany, the infamous “War Guilt Clause” of the Treaty of Versailles (Article 231) deflected attention away from limitations of the doctrine of national sovereignty. The outbreak and devastation of the “war to end all wars” served as an indictment of one malevolent nation-state rather than a blaring alarm of weakness in the international order itself. Thus, Versailles largely recapitulated past precedent. The historian Margaret MacMillan (2002, p. xxviii) notes that the conveners of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference “carefully studied the only available example—the Congress of Vienna” and that the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office commissioned a historian to write a book on the Congress of Vienna to serve as guidance in Paris. In the end, the Wilsonian order established modest precedent for a more collaborative “good and faithful neighborhood” of sovereign nation-states. However, transnational considerations of justice, rights, and obligations primarily pertained, as had been the case before the war, to nation-states, rather than to ethnic groups, families, religious communities, voluntary associations, or individuals.

3.2. Interwar Innovations: The State’s Expanding Role in Human Welfare

Historians conclude that the 1930s were a pivotal juncture in the United States’ shift from private “philanthropy” to direct government responsibility and intervention on behalf of impoverished and suffering people. Olivier Zunz (2012), a historian of philanthropy, contrasts the 1927 Mississippi River flood with the great American drought of 1930. The former, regarded as the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, affected 170 counties. In response to the flood, Herbert Hoover, the hero of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, sought to replicate his World War I-era relief success—a model that relied heavily on private funding for private philanthropic operations (Nash 2017). In the words of Zunz (2012, p. 112), Hoover’s approach was a “no-cost-to-the-federal-government relief effort.” Thus, the Red Cross led a private-public partnership with widely lauded results. However, the drought of 1930 caused a much greater crisis as it affected more than 1000 counties in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. The scale of the natural disaster, in combination with deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, overwhelmed private philanthropy.3

The federal government, breaking with the precedent of relying on private donations and loans for disaster relief, attempted to grant $25 million to the Red Cross for unemployment relief in January 1931. The Red Cross rejected the offer on the principle that its mission was not unemployment relief, and with fears, seconded by many, of the consequences of the government entering so directly into the philanthropic domain. The U.S. House of Representatives Majority leader, John Q. Tilson (R-CT), expressed the concern well when he stated, “Once the Red Cross is destroyed, as it must inevitably will be by a Federal dole, and our local charities paralyzed, as they will be when the Federal Government takes over responsibility for charitable relief, the appropriations that must follow as a consequence of such a policy would now stagger belief” (Zunz 2012, p. 122). Additionally, Tilson astutely remarked, “We are now at the crossroads so far as our charities are concerned” (Zunz 2012, p. 122).

With the Red Cross unwilling to play the role of government-funded, as well as at least partially directed, relief agency, the US Congress passed a $20 million aid package in February 1931, which the federal Treasury Department distributed directly to state and local emergency relief committees. Fast forward a few years to the Dust Bowl of 1934–35 and the federal government became the undisputed primary provider of humanitarian relief in the U.S. Zunz observes, “the role that the Red Cross played in alleviating dust bowl conditions in 1934 and 1935 was minor compared to its part in drought-relief efforts in the Mississippi [and Ohio] Valley in 1930–31 or in the 1927 flood. Federally funded New Deal relief and policy-planning had become the preferred method for confronting disasters” (Zunz 2012, p. 135). The Roosevelt administration crossed the proverbial Rubicon from private philanthropy to public provision. As such, Michael N. Barnett (2013, p. 99), a scholar of international relations and the history of humanitarianism, observes that “the global depression of the 1930s caused states as ideologically diverse as the United States, France, Britain, and Germany to accept that the state had a responsibility to protect its citizens during rough times.” He describes this emerging political vision as the “shift from the state-as-nightwatchman to the state-as-caretaker” (Barnett 2013.).

Government provision for human welfare also developed, to some degree, along transnational lines. The League of Nations made limited but genuine progress in foregrounding humanitarian interests, setting a precedent for the same in the post-World War II era. Per the analysis of Keith David Watenpaugh (2010, p. 1318), a historian and human rights theorist, the League viewed “repairing the damage that the war had inflicted on select populations as one of its chief humanitarian obligations.” It made a significant effort, for example, to assist displaced Armenian women and children in the early 1920s. This activity flowed explicitly from the minor mandate in Articles 23 and 25 of the League’s covenant to undertake humanitarian initiatives. The Chief of the Opium and Social Questions Section of the League of Nations, Rachel E. Crowdy (1927, p. 153), praised this emphasis in 1927, saying, “The people who drew up the Covenant of the League showed great vision when they included social and humanitarian questions among its responsibilities.” Thus, while faltering in its application, the League of Nations took a tentative step toward transnational humanitarian intervention and the concomitant implicit diminution of state sovereignty.

At the same time, Watenpaugh (2010, p. 1318) highlights the ideological constraints of League humanitarianism, noting that it occurred “along liberal nationalist, Wilsonian lines.” The sovereignty of nation-states remained the central principle guiding League activity, including care for vulnerable and marginalized people. A 1922 letter between two Rockefeller Foundation leaders discussing the work of the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) captures this continued Westphalian framework. The missive begins by justifying the LNHO’s work: “There are certain health functions that are international in character; national governments cannot undertake them; they are important for the health of the people of all lands” (Weindling 1997, p. 269). However, the Rockefeller Foundation recognized the tension between transnational humanitarianism and the authority of states. National ministries of health, the author acknowledged, could perceive the LNHO as an “unwelcome intruder” (Weindling 1997, p. 270). Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation set lower funding levels for the LNHO in part based on its aspiration neither to “usurp governmental authority” nor “transgress national sovereignty” (ibid.). Even in caring for vulnerable populations, Westphalian notions of state sovereignty dominated international relations after World War I.

Overall, the interwar period witnessed a modest expansion of the role of governmental and transnational bodies in addressing humanitarian disasters and human suffering. However, the change remained nascent—past precedents and reasonable political concerns over national autonomy constrained innovation. Thus, the two decades between the World Wars are mostly remembered as a time of failure. The Wilsonian order never truly materialized, the Great Depression ravaged economies around the globe, and the terrifying specter of a renewed war loomed. Auden (2007, p. 95), the great English poet and writer, captured the despondent mood in the opening of his poem entitled September 1, 1939:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

3.3. Responding to World War II: Beyond Westphalia

Frank and Reinisch (2014, p. 481), historians of international relations, characterize the League of Nations’ humanitarian efforts in Auden’s “low dishonest decade” not as “a shortage of ideas but of political will.” This sentiment serves as a fitting post-mortem for the post-World War I order in general. Unfortunately, another and more cataclysmic conflagration would be necessary to create greater political will.

MacMillan (2002, p. xxvi) contrasts the two World Wars, saying, “away from the battlefields, Europe still looked much the same [after World War I]. The great cities remained, the railway lines were more or less intact, ports still functioned. It was not like the Second World War, when the very bricks and mortar were pulverized.” World War II brought an unrestrained “total war” that devastated not just armies, but countries, cities, and villages, and took the lives of millions upon millions of civilians. The methods of total war resulted in calamities such as the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Nanjing Massacre, the atomic desolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the siege of Stalingrad, and the “Final Solution.” The Treaty of Versailles’ conveners, in their darkest nightmares, could never have anticipated that 60 million or more people, the majority of whom were non-combatants, would die in another world war that began a mere 20 years after the conclusion of their treaty.

At the end of the Second World War, virtually no one could deny the insufficiency of the existing geopolitical order, one built on the doctrine of national sovereignty. Striking at the heart of the challenge, Arjun Appadurai (1990, p. 297), a theorist of globalization, describes the hyphen that links “nation” and “state” in the term “nation-state” as “now less an icon of conjunction than an index of disjuncture.” The nation and the state are distinct entities, often with competing goals and values. Thus, the relationship between a nation-state and its citizenry can be conflictual. At the levels of ethnic groups and individuals, the doctrines of national sovereignty and the balance of power may undermine human welfare. World War II, and above all the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma, and others, burned this truth into the human consciousness.

To be sure, the sovereign nation-state would continue to serve as the central pillar of global order after World War II. Given this reality, the moniker “post-Westphalian” overstates the discontinuity with the pre-World War II international order.4 “Westphalian-plus” seems a more accurate description of the aspirations of a wide range of actors in the 1940s. Various transnational institutions emerged in an attempt to mitigate the weaknesses inherent in and abuses of the doctrines of national sovereignty and the balance of power. For example, the landmark Bretton Woods Conference (1944) gave birth to the International Monetary Fund, as well as the predecessors of both the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. According to the analysis of the political scientist Helen V. Milner (2005, p. 834), states united to create these institutions “to manage the world economy and prevent another Great Depression.”

On a more directly humanitarian interventionist note, representatives of forty-four nations established the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) at a gathering in Washington, D.C. in 1943. This transnational initiative, which one contemporary relief worker called “a magnificent unprecedented feat,” sought to correct the slow and uncoordinated transnational relief and reconstruction that occurred in the aftermath of World War I (Reinisch 2011, p. 258). Elizabeth Borgwardt (2007, p. 119), a historian and legal scholar, identifies the transition from “the private to the public realm in relief and rehabilitation” inherent in the UNRRA as a part of the “internationalization of New Deal-style problem solving.” An editorial from The Nation in 1944 proclaimed the sentiment of many in the Roosevelt administration: “Only a New Deal for the world, more far-reaching and consistent than our own faltering New Deal, can prevent the coming of World War III” (Borgwardt 2007, p. 6). The historian of humanitarianism, Gerard Daniel Cohen (2008, p. 438), following a similar line to Zunz’s account of the 1930s, argues that the advent of the UNRRA, which owed its founding to Roosevelt’s advocacy, marked “the end of the ‘charitable phase’ of modern humanitarianism.” Private charity was unable to handle the massive humanitarian burden created by World War II. Thus, governments, individually and in coordination, assumed a leading role in providing basic goods and services to people within and outside their borders.

Post-World War II transnational institution-building extended well beyond economic and humanitarian coordination. Global leaders created organizations such as the International Court of Justice and the UN to bolster international order and promote human welfare. A comparison between the preambles of the UN Charter and the Covenant of the League of Nations provides a helpful illustration of the differences in thinking at the end of the two World Wars. The United Nations Charter begins:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.

(Charter of the United Nations 1945)

The Charter of the United Nations proclaims, from the outset, an ambitious goal to protect not only nation-states but also minority communities and individual human beings within states. In contrast, the League’s charter begins, as quoted above, with concern for “nations,” “organized peoples,” and “governments”—all of which denote nation-states—and treats the welfare of individuals as an afterthought in two of its last four articles (Articles 23 and 25). The UN’s charter reverses both the order and the weight of this treatment. A change in emphasis is visible within the first line of the preamble, which reads, “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” (emphasis added). This statement departs from the Covenant of the League of Nations’ nation-state-oriented opening formulation: “THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES.” Furthermore, the subsequent line of the United Nations’ Charter laments the impact of war on “mankind”—a clue to the emphasis on humanity over polity. If these lexical differences seem minor, the following statement of the Charter’s preamble confirms a significant shift in political vision. It proclaims the determination to safeguard “fundamental human rights,” “the dignity and worth of the human person,” and “the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In this discourse, the human person takes center stage, an emphasis that also led to the stipulation of a commission “for the promotion of human rights” in Article 68. Thus, while the UN Charter retains clear Westphalian tones, it diverges from prior covenants and treaties by foregrounding human rights and human dignity.

On 10 December 1948, approximately three years after the UN Charter’s signing (24 October 1945), the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without a single dissenting vote. The UDHR, a foundational document for the Westphalian-plus project, frames human welfare as a fundamental moral principle. As such, it defines human rights as antecedent to positive law or social contracts. Thomas W. Pogge (2008, p. 58), a scholar of philosophy and international relations, describes and contrasts this conception of rights as follows:

Supranational, national, and subnational systems of law contain various human rights. The content of these rights and of any corresponding legal obligations and burdens depends on the legislative, judicial, and executive bodies that maintain and interpret the laws in question. In the aftermath of World War II, it has come to be widely acknowledged that there are also moral human rights, whose validity is independent of any and all governmental bodies. In their case, in fact, the dependence is thought to run the other way: only if they respect moral human rights do any governmental bodies have legitimacy, that is, the capacity to create moral obligations to comply with, and the moral authority to enforce, their laws and orders.

Per this logic, a state’s legitimacy could depend, in part, on its treatment of minority groups and other communities within its borders, and potentially even on the poor treatment of individual citizens or residents. Thus, national sovereignty and human rights were now potentially in conflict, evoking Appadurai’s notion of the disjunctive hyphen in the term “nation-state.”5

The total war of World War II exposed the devastating limitations of an international order grounded only in sovereign prerogative. Immense civilian suffering catalyzed a “Westphalian-plus” response. States retained their primacy, yet they created institutions that elevated human welfare. The birth of transnational institutions such as the UNRRA, the United Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signaled a shift from merely protecting the sanctity of (powerful) nations to also safeguarding the rights of persons and communities within them.

4. Toward a Philosophy of Human Rights

4.1. Christian Personalism: A Third Way Political Philosophy

The sudden foregrounding of the human person and their rights in the arena of international relations prompts a question: Whence “human rights”? From what sources did the concept of human rights emerge in the 1940s? Interwar crises and the horrors of World War II fostered a greater openness to direct governmental and transnational provision of humanitarian relief and social services. However, the philosophical core of the emergent concept is another matter. Moyn (2015, pp. 67–68), whose historical account demonstrates the novelty of human rights discourse in the 1940s, observes that “human rights came to the world not just as part of a wartime internationalization of the American New Deal,” but also as a “spiritual and often explicitly religious philosophy of the human person.”6 Moyn’s statement encapsulates the two-pronged framework of this paper: The rapid rise of human rights advocacy in the 1940s stemmed from responses to a series of catastrophic events and an evolution in the philosophical conception of the human person.

Chief among the religious intellectuals writing about these subjects was Jacques Maritain, the “premier postwar philosopher of human rights” (Moyn 2015, p. 68). As a Thomist-Aristotelian philosopher and theologian, he played a notable role in laying the philosophical groundwork leading up to the UDHR. His most prominent official position related to transnational human rights was serving on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Committee on the Theoretical Bases of Human Rights in 1947. The “Philosophers’ Committee,” as it was also known, worked to produce a list of rights with broad acceptance across cultures and ideologies. Maritain wrote the introduction to the committee’s oft-cited final product: Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (UNESCO 1949).

In his own work on rights, Maritain (2012, p. 9) described the post-World War I era as “the liquidation of what is known as the ‘modern world.’” In the new world, lasting peace would only prevail if regimes approved of “the essential bases of common life, respect for human dignity and the rights of the person” (Maritain 2012, p. 19). This formulation inverts the logical sequence of Westphalian welfare. For Maritain, international peace flowed from respecting human rights and promoting human welfare. In contrast, the Westphalian ideal implies that human welfare is a byproduct of international peace.

The preceding quote incorporates one of the central, if seemingly pedestrian, themes of Maritain’s framework of rights: the “person” or “personhood.” He devoted significant effort to developing the notion of the person as something richer and more human than the isolated individual. Toward that end, he propounded a tripartite personalist definition of human society. It is “personalist because it considers society to be a whole composed of persons whose dignity is anterior to society;” “communal because it recognizes the fact that the person tends naturally toward society and communion;” and “pluralist because it assumes that the development of the human person normally requires a plurality of autonomous communities which have their own rights, liberties and authority” (Maritain 2012, p. 78). Building on this idea of human society, Maritain (2012, p. 69) exhorted “us not to say that the aim of society is the individual good or the mere aggregate of the individual good of each of the persons who constitute it. Such a formula would… lead to an ‘anarchy of atoms.’” That perilous notion resembles Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “claim that man is subject to no law other than that of his will and his freedom, and that he must ‘obey only himself’” (Maritain 2012, p. 108). This error, for Maritain (1944, p. 186), was a logical result of the subjectivism, even solipsism, inherent in Cartesian philosophy, which he described as “the great French sin in modern history.” The individual is fundamentally independent of others, for good and for ill. By contrast, the person is relational by nature. Therefore, interpersonal connection constitutes a human good in and of itself—relationships and community are not only instrumentally useful but are also intrinsically valuable.

This dual emphasis or tension resonates with Mary Ann Glendon’s description of a key facet of the intellectual history of human rights. Glendon (2002, p. xvii), a historian of human rights, observes a philosophical divide, similar to the fissure between Western and Soviet views of rights in the post-World War II period, that occurred after what she labels “the great charters of humanity’s first rights moment” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (i.e., the British Bill of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789). A distinction emerged in human rights discourse between “dialects” of equality and liberty. The former, found primarily in continental Europe, “had more room for ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’… tempered rights with duties and limits… [and] combined political and civil rights with public obligations to provide relief for the poor” (Glendon 2002). In the twentieth century, this conception of rights found a home in the European Socialist and Christian Democratic parties. The latter dialect, Anglo-American in origin, “emphasized individual liberty and initiative more than equality or social solidarity and was infused with a greater mistrust of government” (Glendon 2002). The political philosophy of Christian personalism, though closer to Christian Democratic than libertarian, attempted to speak both historic rights dialects. On the one hand, the horrors of fascist collectivism in World War II, as well as the perils of communist collectivism after the war, tempered their enthusiasm for the rights dialect of equality and solidarity. On the other hand, the nearly incomprehensible total abrogation of the most basic human rights of so many people brought immense urgency to the task of securing the welfare and dignity of the human person against the power of society and the state.

4.2. Christian Personalism and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Maritain’s distinction between the person and the individual explains an otherwise pedantic dispute involving Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik. Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted the UDHR. Malik, a Thomist-Aristotelian philosopher and theologian, like Maritain, served as the rapporteur for Roosevelt’s committee. A Lebanese scholar-turned-diplomat, Malik would also succeed Roosevelt as Chair of the Commission on Human Rights and then serve as President of the UN General Assembly in 1958. Glendon (2002, p. 42) notes, “[Roosevelt] had spoken of the primacy of the ‘individual,’ while [Malik] preferred to use the term person to emphasize the social dimension of personhood and to avoid connotations of radical autonomy and self-sufficiency.” While Roosevelt focused on the inviolability of each human being in the wake of the murder of millions of civilians during World War II, Malik proffered a more nuanced position. He attempted to hold together both the inviolable dignity and the inherent relationality of human beings.

Without a doubt, Malik recognized the urgency and priority of protecting the physical well-being and civil rights of every person. He wrote,

We are [in the UDHR] dealing with the rights of man as man, and not with the rights of society or the state. The problem of human rights arose in recent years precisely because society and the state trespassed upon man, to the extent, in totalitarian states, of shocking him altogether. In our formulation we are therefore called upon to correct the excesses precisely of statism and socialism.

(Malik 1949, p. 5)7

Although opposed to radical individualism, here Malik expressed grave concern about excess in the other direction. He believed that collectivism, be it fascist or communist, entails an opposite but equally flawed conception of human nature and society. The prerogatives of the collective, society, or the state take priority over the rights and needs of citizens and inhabitants. Thus, he warned:

There must be a core of humanity which cannot be ‘suspended’ or ‘derogated from’ under any circumstances, and the whole present problem of human rights is to take them outside of the determination of individual governments. It was precisely in the name of ‘the public interest’ and ‘the general welfare’ that tyrants and dictators have always trampled upon the fundamental freedoms and rights of man.

(Malik and Glendon 2000, p. 10)

In the aftermath of World War II, with the defeat of fascism, Soviet communism was the principal embodiment of Malik’s collectivist fear. During meetings of the drafting committee of the UDHR, Soviet representatives repeatedly expressed disapproval of the Declaration’s limitation on the state’s authority. A delegate to the drafting committee from the USSR, Andrei Vyshinsky, a Soviet jurist and legal theorist, declared the draft UDHR to be “unsatisfactory” (Hundred and Eighty-Third Plenary Meeting 1948, p. 923). He voiced the USSR’s primary concern, the issue of national sovereignty, remarking, “The USSR delegation had pointed out that numerous articles completely ignored the sovereign rights of democratic Governments, moreover, that the draft contained provisions directly contradicting those of the [UN] Charter, which prohibited interference in the internal affairs of States” (Hundred and Eighty-Third Plenary Meeting 1948). Moreover, one of the central emphases of the Soviet delegation, in the words of Malik, was “the duties of man to society” (Malik and Glendon 2000, p. 122). At almost every turn, the Soviet conception of rights prioritized the state’s interests over those of the individual.

Ultimately, the UDHR contained most of what Malik had hoped. Its text primarily focuses on civil and political rights (Articles 1–21). In that domain, he was most concerned to include Article 18, which codifies the “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” (United Nations 1948). For Malik (1968, p. 10), a devout Greek Orthodox Christian, liberty of conscience and religion were the core of “man’s absolute freedom.” Thus, the UDHR takes a strong stand for the inviolability of the human person.

Yet, the Declaration also values and enumerates protections for humans as communal beings. To begin with, the final version of the UDHR uses the term “person” five times, “personality” three times, and “individual” only once. Malik also worked persistently to promote and safeguard intermediate institutions in the text. For example, he successfully advocated for the inclusion of the clause, “alone or in community with others,” in his favored Article 18 (United Nations 1948). This addition protects not only individual freedom of conscience but also the rights of religious, cultural, and political bodies. Additionally, Malik sought to incorporate protections for the family in the UDHR. Most significantly, he pushed for the inclusion of Article 16.3, which states, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” (United Nations 1948). Thus, according to the UDHR, the family, not the state, is the fundamental human social group. On a closely related note, Malik’s Lebanese delegation successfully lobbied for the inclusion of Article 26.3, which recognizes the priority of parents in educational decision-making for their children. Summarizing the motivation behind the emphasis on family and social institutions, Malik later stated that the “fight for freedom” in the late 1940s resided “primarily in asserting the rights of these intermediate institutions” in the face of “overwhelming claims of the state” (Malik and Glendon 2000, p. 26). Thus, he exemplified the dual emphasis of Christian personalism in his work on the UDHR, declaring the universal and inherent rights of individual persons while also protecting intermediate institutions without which the relational dimension of human nature languishes.

4.3. Christian Human Rights: Adaptation to a Changing Environment

4.3.1. Leo XIII

As noted at the outset, Moyn argues this was all “rather new at the time.” Yet, Christian personalist rights theory has roots in the Catholic Church’s efforts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to chart a middle way between the atomizing individualism of the capitalist Industrial Revolution and collectivist overcorrections to that threat. The second paragraph of Pope Leo XIII’s (1891, p. 2) pioneering encyclical Rerum Novarum states: “It is no easy matter to define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labor.” The Pope lamented “the greed of unchecked competition,” “rapacious usury,” and a “yoke little better than that of slavery itself” (Leo XIII 1891, p. 3). Yet he also warned that “socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property,” and denounced their aspiration as “emphatically unjust” because “they would rob the lawful possessor” and “distort the function of the state” (Leo XIII 1891, p. 4). The historians Winks and Neuberger (2005, p. 150) observe that Rerum Novarum “described the defects of capitalism as vigorously as any socialist, but attacked with equal vigor the socialist view of property and the doctrine of class war.” Although the encyclical addressed, as identified in its opening paragraph, a “conflict now raging” between capital and labor, rather than a defense of the human person in the context of total war and the Holocaust, the echoes of Pope Leo XIII’s thought are evident in mid-twentieth-century personalist anthropology and political philosophy. Personalist political philosophy charted a middle way between individualism and collectivism because personalist anthropology upholds the inviolability and relationality of each human being.

A crucial reason for the overemphasis by Moyn and others on the discontinuity between 1940s Christian human rights advocacy and prior Christian doctrine stems from the Roman Catholic Church’s wariness of the French Revolutionary origins of the droits de l’homme.8 The Church eschewed the continental rights dialect (see Glendon above), in significant part, due to its association with secularism and anti-clericalism. However, ecclesiastical skepticism of the concept of rights waned in the face of evolving social problems. As the deprivations of the Industrial Revolution mounted and the threat of collectivist responses grew, theologians and philosophers appealed to the notion of human dignity to advocate for human rights.

Returning to Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII (1891, pp. 20, 36) addressed the dignity of individuals directly when he challenged employers “to respect in every man his dignity as a person,” and not place on their employees “unjust” burdens that are “repugnant to their dignity as human beings.” The encyclical also warns the state that “no man may with impunity outrage that human dignity which God himself treats with great reverence” (Leo XIII 1891, p. 40). Building on the notion of inherent dignity, Leo XIII affirmed personal rights and the state’s obligation to protect them. He declared that the state has for “its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them,” and that these “rights must be religiously respected wherever they exist” (Leo XIII 1891, p. 52). The rights at issue here belong “to each individual man,” and “every precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals” (Leo XIII 1891). Furthermore, “when there is a question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a special claim to consideration… and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State” (Leo XIII 1891, p. 37). This latter statement resonates with the “preferential option for the poor,” a key concept in later Catholic liberation theology (Gutierrez 1988).

Another writing of Leo XIII, In Plurimis, merits brief mention regarding the evolution of human rights. In the encyclical, which responds to the abolition of slavery in Brazil, the Pope utilized the language of “human rights” and “the rights of nations and of humanity” (Leo XIII 1888, pp. 19, 21). He also described slavery as an evil born of sin, which came to pass “through an absolute forgetfulness of our common nature, and of human dignity, and the likeness of God stamped upon us” (Leo XIII 1888, p. 4). This last quote evinces earlier foundational doctrines that informed the human rights push of the mid-twentieth century. The theological concept Imago Dei asserts that all humans are created in the “image of God.” As such, all people share a common nature with inherent dignity, and thus every person possesses certain inviolable rights.

4.3.2. The Crisis of the 1930s

In particular, the 1930s proved crucial for the evolution of religious and philosophical notions of human rights. The intellectual historian, James Chappel (2020, p. 80), concludes, “The crisis of the 1930s played a larger role in [human rights] history than is normally believed. That interwar decade should be viewed as a crucible in its own right.” That crucible prompted “a Catholic turn to rights in the 1930s” (Chappel 2020, p. 63). An illuminating piece of evidence for this conclusion was the surge of individual “rights” language in Papal encyclicals. In the three prior decades (1900–1929), Popes employed rights discourse almost exclusively concerning corporate bodies (the Church most frequently, but also families, schools, the working class, etc.). By contrast, the encyclicals of the 1930s commonly addressed the rights of persons, doing so more than thrice as many times as in the prior thirty years combined (Chappel 2020, p. 66).

At the beginning of this pivotal decade, Pope Pius XI promulgated Quadragesimo Anno in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. The interwar encyclical condemns “that unquenchable thirst for riches and temporal goods, which has at all times impelled men to break God’s laws and trample upon the rights of their neighbors” and lauds “a new branch of law” that arose due to the “continuous and unwearied labor to protect vigorously the sacred rights of the workers that flow from their dignity as men and as Christians” (Pius XI 1931, pp. 5, 25). Similarly, the Irish Constitution of 1937, with an explicitly Christian theological foundation, aimed to protect the “dignity and freedom of the individual” (Constitution of Ireland/Bunreacht Na hÉireann 2018, p. 2). Moyn (2015, p. 15) suggests this is the first appearance of the terminology “human dignity” in constitutional history. In the same year, Pius XI (1937) surreptitiously distributed the sermon “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Concern”) throughout the German Catholic priesthood to be read synchronously on Palm Sunday across the nation in the vernacular, not Latin, for maximum comprehension. This message, grounded in Thomistic natural law theory, asserts “the basic fact that man as a person possesses rights that he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect” (Pius XII 1937, p. 30). In other words, rights are antecedent to society and, therefore, must be recognized and protected, not granted, by the state.

This decade also saw the emergence of Emmanuel Mounier and Dorothy Day, two Christian personalists who promoted human rights in various ways. Mounier, a French Catholic who drew heavily from existentialist and Marxist philosophy, while rejecting the atheism and materialism often associated with those schools of thought, sought a moral and spiritual revolution (Hellman 1981). He advanced a personalist vision through the journal, Esprit, which he founded in 1931, and later authored one of the most prominent articulations of personalist thought, Le Personnalisme (Mounier 1949).9 His desired spiritual revolution would entail, among other things, navigating a middle way between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the collectivist tyrannies threatening human welfare. Throughout the 1930s, Mounier developed a third-way position similar to Maritain’s—Maritain was an informal mentor to Mounier. In the 1940s, Mounier turned his attention toward rights (see below).

Day founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, alongside Peter Maurin (Miller 1982). Through her activism and editorship of The Catholic Worker magazine, she read and practiced the Christian personalist ideals of Maritain, and especially Mounier, as well as those of Catholic Social Teaching, including Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno (Williams 2024). In the 1930s, Day focused on labor rights and care for the poor. Her landmark 1939 book, House of Hospitality, details the provision of housing, food, clothing, and other services through the Catholic Worker movement (Day 1939; Day et al. 2015). Thus, while Day rarely used the terminology “human rights,” her indefatigable work to promote the welfare of the most vulnerable members of society embodied the principle of inherent human dignity.

4.3.3. Christian Human Rights in the 1940s

The Christian human rights evolution of the tumultuous 1930s carried into the 1940s. An influential Christmas message of Pope Pius XII (1942), subtitled “A clear cut statement on the principles of internal order of states and peoples requisite for right international relations,” recommends five points for ordering a peaceful society. The first and foundational point of the sermon is “The Dignity of the Person.” He challenged those who would have the “Star of Peace to shine out and stand over society” to give “back to the human person the dignity given to it by God at the very beginning” (Pius XII 1942). This is a prominent, theologically grounded affirmation of the dignity of the human person. The Christmas Message makes an additional claim that recalls this paper’s prior discussion of the link between international order and the welfare of individual persons. Pius XII (1942) wrote:

Order, which is fundamental in an association of men (of beings, that is, who strive to attain an end appropriate to their nature) is not merely external linking up of parts which are numerically distinct. It is rather, and must be, a tendency and an ever more perfect approach to an internal union; and this does not exclude differences founded in fact and sanctioned by the will of God or by supernatural standard.

That is, “international relations and internal order are intimately related” (Pius XII 1942). External peace between nations was not possible, in the Pope’s eyes, without internal stability and development in “material, social and intellectual spheres” (Pius XII 1942). In other words, Pius XII advocated a Westphalian-plus approach to global society.

Moyn (2015, p. 2) concludes that the 1942 Christmas Message, “in the perspective of world history,” introduced new values. As a judgment of Christian rights advocacy of the period, this somewhat hyperbolic assessment undervalues the broader theological response to the Industrial Revolution, dating back at least as far as Leo XIII. Christian personalists traced their political philosophy and ideas of human dignity to Thomas Aquinas’ natural law theory through the Neo-Scholasticism or Thomistic renewal of nineteenth-century Catholicism. Similarly, as a judgment of human rights theory writ large, Moyn’s statement ignores many other traditions and pioneering figures, some dating back centuries and even millennia, who contributed to the development of human rights theories and championed related causes (see Section 4.3.4).

However, Moyn’s (2015, p. 2) analysis of the Christmas Message hits closer to home when he observes, “On that day, the appeal to reaffirm faith in the dignity of the human person, and the rights that follow from that dignity, reached unprecedented heights of public visibility.” The reaffirmation and extension of existing doctrine, rather than de novo theological or philosophical innovation, best describe Pius XII’s sermon. The novelty derived more from the strength of the medium (the Papal megaphone) than from the message’s human rights content.

In the same year as the influential Christmas Message, 1942, Maritain (1942, 2012) published his most significant works on human rights: Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (The Rights of Man and the Natural Law).10 He argued that inherent human dignity derives from the direct relationship between each person and the Absolute as implied in the Imago Dei doctrine. This theological foundation enabled Maritain to navigate the tension between persons and society, the first of two central questions that he addressed in the section on “The Human Person” in this book (the second question being “the rights of the human person”) (Maritain 2012, p. 65). Persons are not merely parts of the created order, but are wholes in themselves, due to “spiritual superexistence” and “the supra-temporal” value of the soul (Maritain 2012, pp. 66–67).11 Being a whole of supra-temporal value, a person’s life and rights are sacrosanct. Therefore, the rights of man, using the gendered language of Maritain following the famous French Declaration of 1789, are not subject to the exigencies of the state or the will of society. He lambasted such a collectivist or statist view as a “totalitarian and atheistic catastrophe of democracy” (Maritain 2012, p. 52). At the same time, a person is an open or relational, rather than a closed, whole. Maritain rejected the monads of Leibniz, denying the characterization of human persons as “little god[s] without doors or windows” (Maritain 2012, p. 68). To the contrary, humans crave and go to great lengths to cultivate relationships with other persons. Thus, Maritain’s position affirms the inherent dignity and relationality of human beings.

The “altogether opposite” theory of human rights, in Maritain’s estimation, was to follow Rousseau in basing rights on human will and freedom, including the belief that rights derive from a social contract (Maritain 2012, p. 108). In fact, only a few months before the United Nations adopted the UDHR, Maritain (1948, p. 3) offered this analysis in the UNESCO Courier:

Men… are today divided… into two antagonistic groups: those who, to a greater or lesser extent, explicitly accept, and those who, to a greater or lesser extent, explicitly reject Natural Law as the basis for those rights. In the eyes of the first, the requirements of his being endow man with certain fundamental and inalienable rights antecedent in nature and superior to society, and are the source whence social life itself, originates and develops, with the duties and rights which that implies. For the second school, man’s rights are relative to the historical development of society and are themselves constantly variable and in a state of flux; they are a product of society itself as it advances with the forward march of history.

Sarah Shortall (2018, p. 457), an intellectual and cultural historian, summarizes Maritain’s position well, writing, “As a Thomist, Maritain believed that human law derives its binding force from its relationship to natural law, which in turn comes from God. He therefore tended to distinguish law from politics proper and envisioned human rights law as a check on political power.” Maritain viewed the alternative approach, in which rights are culturally conditioned, as illusory because it lacks both an objective standard and a means to circumscribe the desires of the ego or the state. He characterized this ego or state-centric philosophy as “false political emancipation” or the “false city of human rights” based on anthropocentric individualism (Maritain 1940, p. 220).

In the meantime, Emmanuel Mounier published a series of four versions of a declaration of rights in Esprit, from the first draft in December 1944 to the final version in May 1945 (Mounier 1944a, 1945a, 1945b; Chevallier 1945).12 Entitled “Déclaration des Droits des personnes et des collectivités” (Declaration of the Rights of Persons and Collectives), the final version consists of three divisions: rights of persons (twenty-six articles), rights of communities (eleven articles), and rights of the state (six articles).13 This structure embodies the personalist view, which holds that humans possess inviolable rights as individuals and in their relationships with others. The first section encompasses a broad range of rights, the majority of which are civil and political, with a sizable minority comprising progressive economic rights (e.g., the rights to employment, to resources necessary to sustain a family, and to union participation). Mounier’s inclusion of second-generation rights hedges against an individualistic anthropology that would focus on the freedom of individuals from interference, the primary domain of first-generation rights. Again, Christian personalism valued both rights dialects, those of liberty and solidarity.

Mounier (1944a, p. 120) added the second and third sections of his document, “Rights of Communities” and “Rights of the State,” to avoid the excesses of philosophical rationalism and the attendant individualism that he believed characterized the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. His elaboration of the rights of communities marks a recalibration away from atomistic individualism, as evident in the first line of that section: “Il existe des communautés naturelles” (“There are natural communities”), which are born outside the state (Mounier 1945a, p. 855). The premier natural community, the family, is entitled to protection by the state, even though the elevation of the family implies a concomitant limitation of the state’s authority. A few years later, Malik took this exact position when, as discussed above, he successfully labored to include the statement, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” in Article 16.3 of the UDHR (United Nations 1948).

The other natural community that Mounier identified in his Declaration is the community of nations. In language parallel to the initial statement on the family, he wrote, “Il existe une communauté internationelle naturelle” (“There is a natural international community”) (Mounier 1945a, p. 855). The transnational character of this natural community carried a vital implication for Mounier: The international community should be federated. Thus, bodies such as the League of Nations and the United Nations had a more elemental basis than social will in Mounier’s political philosophy. Furthermore, the concept of federation recognizes the right of each nation to maintain its cultural, linguistic, and spiritual independence. Yet it also limits national sovereignty by the prerogatives of the community of nations. Mounier discussed the relationship between national sovereignty and the international community in greater detail in his most famous work, Le Personnalisme (Mounier 1949, 1989). He believed world unity would come under three arguably utopian conditions: (a) “that the nations give up their complete sovereignty… to a democratic community of peoples;” (b) “that this union be achieved between the peoples and their representatives, not between the several governments;” and (c) “that the forces making for imperialism, especially the economic forces which act sometimes in national and sometimes in cosmopolitan disguise, can be kept under control by the united peoples” (Mounier 1989, p. 110). Whatever the feasibility of adopting these recommendations, Mounier’s international political philosophy incorporated a constrained view of national sovereignty.

4.3.4. Two Clarifications: Christianity Against Human Rights and Other Rights Traditions

Two crucial points demand comment. First, the discussion of theological and philosophical adaptation to a changing environment (Section 4.3) is not meant to imply that the Catholic church or Christianity more broadly has been an unalloyed bulwark of human rights. Christian institutions, leaders, and laity, both sincere and fraudulent, have been involved in all manner of repression, subjugation, racism, colonialism, torture, war, murder, enslavement, sexual abuse, and other violations of human rights. Moreover, as Christian personalism, predominantly Catholic and Methodist, grew in influence, other contemporaneous Christian responses to the same upheavals took on an authoritarian or even fascist character. Protestant Christian support for German National Socialism (e.g., the movement of “German Christians”) and Spanish Catholic support for Francisco Franco (e.g., the Collective Letter of the Spanish Bishops of 1937) are two of the most egregious examples of Christianity in conflict with human rights in the same era (Bergen 2007; Ericksen 2012; Pastor 2007; Vincent 1996).

Moreover, some Christian advocacy of human rights during the transwar era jeopardized human rights. Duranti (2017) shows, for instance, that French right-wing actors, with strong connections to the Catholic Church, embraced human rights and promoted the European Court of Justice, at least partially, to have a transnational mechanism of appeal for Nazi collaborators and Vichy government officials. Or, the Catholic-inspired Irish Constitution of 1937, which enumerated many rights, criminalized “blasphemous” and “indecent matter” (Constitution of Ireland/Bunreacht Na hÉireann 2018, p. 160).

Christian personalists also held and promoted positions in tension or at odds with various human rights. Malik’s fear of state power, for example, informed his skepticism of economic rights. Therefore, he was pleased that second-generation rights (Articles 22–27) were “more than balanced” by first-generation rights (Articles 1–21) in the UDHR (United Nations Economic and Social Council 1948, p. 4). Moreover, Chappel (2011) details several connections between Christian personalism and authoritarian movements. For instance, before the Vatican placed Action Française on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1926, numerous prominent Christian personalists supported the royalist reactionary movement of Charles Maurras. Similarly, beginning in the 1930s, Waldemar Gurian, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Maritain—each a Christian personalist—helped lay the groundwork for what became known as “totalitarianism theory.” While defending pluralism and the autonomy of intermediate institutions against Carl Schmitt’s notion of the “total state,” their commitment to democratic governance remained ambivalent.

The second clarification relates to the limited scope of the historiographic dialogue or dispute that this paper addresses. It centers on only one of the sources (Christian personalism), albeit an influential source, for the concepts of human dignity and human rights in the transwar era. Numerous other notable individuals and communities advocated universal and inherent human rights in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Within the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), the committee that drafted the UDHR, several streams of rights theory existed. Eleanor Roosevelt (2014, p. 317) noted, for instance, the ideological conflict between Pen-Chung Chang, a Confucian, and Malik. Chang, representing Republican Era China, defended a pluralist approach to human rights in response to Malik’s insistence on natural law theory. Due to Malik’s early intransigence, Chang also recommended that the committee spend several months studying Confucian thought.14 To take another example, the author of the initial blueprint of the declaration, John Peters Humphrey, director of the UN Secretariat for Human Rights, was a socialist. He and Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile fought for the inclusion of economic rights, Articles 22–27 of the UDHR, against reticence from Malik and resistance from various North Atlantic nations (Morsink 1999, p. 157; see also Waltz 2001). An additional influential member of the UNCHR, René Cassin of France, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his work on the UDHR (including drafting the first version of the document), joined with Malik and several Latin American delegates to advocate for the use of the term “person” rather than “individual” in the Declaration. However, Cassin’s rights theory, flowing from secular French Enlightenment philosophy, contrasted with that of Christian personalism (Winter and Prost 2013). Ideologically, Cassin was closer to such transwar rights advocates as the French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, which published the Complément à la Déclaration des Droits de l’homme in 1936, and H. G. Wells, who published a Declaration of Rights in 1940.15

The many additional examples of the diversity of rights advocacy in the early to mid-twentieth century include figures such as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar,16 W. E. B. Du Bois,17 Antoine Fangulis,18 Hersch Lauterpacht,19 André Mandelstam,20 Jawaharlal Nehru,21 and Kwame Nkrumah.22 On a related note, excellent scholarly works explore a wide variety of ideas and traditions related to human rights. For example, the philosophy of Ubuntu, deriving from the Bantu peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa, centers on the interconnectedness or relational nature of human beings (Ramose 1999; Metz 2011). The communitarian ethic of Ubuntu departs from Western rights theory and its canonical texts. Similarly, historic Confucian values of harmony and human dignity are fertile soil for a relational theory of rénquán (human rights)—an approach that overlaps with personalist anthropology (Angle 2002). A relational theory of human rights leads almost inexorably to a high valuation of duty toward others. Thus, the common pairing of the terms quánlì hé yìwù “rights and duties”) in Chinese treatments of human rights. On a related note, the link between rights and duties is foundational to the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, promulgated just months before the UDHR by the Organization of American States (1948) in Bogotá, Colombia.

Additionally, some scholars explicate the antecedents of human rights over the longue durée through a variety of cultures and traditions. For example, Paul Gordon Lauren (2011), while foregrounding World War II and the UDHR, discusses ancient doctrines of major world religions (e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam), a variety of historic philosophies of human nature and natural law (e.g., the Mohist school of moral philosophy, the Code of Hammurabi, Greek philosophy, Roman Stoicism, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and the Iroquois Confederacy), the traditional canon of Western rights documents (e.g., the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), and Enlightenment philosophy (e.g., Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant). Less expansive, but also interested in ancient antecedents, Jürgen Moltmann (1977, p. 27) anchors the history of rights in the Sophist and Stoic idea of humanitas, Cicero’s universal homo humanus over the provincial homo romanus, and the Hebrew scriptural/Old Testament doctrine of Imago Dei.

Thus, the point of Section 4.3 is not the uniqueness of Christian personalism or Christian human rights. In that separate, but closely related historiographic question, I would argue for the transwar influence of Neo-Scholasticism and Christian personalism in more muted terms than Moyn. Rather, Section 4.3 contends that the Christian personalist contribution to the emergence of human rights discourse and protections in the mid-twentieth century, whatever its weight, has more to do with the adaptation or evolution of existing religious thought in response to the exigencies of the immediate historical context than with a radical departure from past doctrine. That is to say, the revisionists have overstated the case for discontinuity in Christian human rights advocacy of the early to mid-twentieth century.

5. Conclusions

In the early to mid-twentieth century, many politicians, activists, political theorists, and religious leaders questioned the minimal responsibility of states toward their inhabitants. The “state-as-nightwatchman” proved insufficient. It rendered individuals perilously vulnerable during natural disasters and economic crises. This concern runs through Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, the League of Nations, early labor rights advocacy, Day’s activism, Roosevelt’s New Deal, Mit Brennender Sorge, Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas Message, Maritain’s theory of rights, the UNRRA, Mounier’s rights declarations, Malik’s work on the UDHR, and Christian personalism more broadly. Moreover, the Westphalian political doctrine of nation-state sovereignty did not produce a “good and faithful neighborhood.” Instead, competition between states resulted in the calamity of total war, and malevolent states murdered, tortured, and abused human beings on a virtually unfathomable scale. These weaknesses of the Westphalian order raised questions about states’ internal obligations toward inhabitants and their external relations with the community of nations.

In response, political leaders amended the role of the state, increasing its responsibility and decreasing its autonomy. National sovereignty would remain, but post-World War II leaders created a series of transnational bodies to mitigate the inherent limitations of the Westphalian order. The creation of a community of nations with the authority to intervene in the affairs of states, embryonic in the League of Nations, took a more substantial form in the 1940s. Perhaps the most radical among post-World War II transnational innovations was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which challenged collectivism, state sovereignty, colonialism, institutionalized racism, and atomistic individualism. The declaration of universal and inherent human rights implied a new political vision.

On the religious front, Christian personalists played a prominent role in developing the twin concepts of human dignity and human rights. The novelty of their contribution was not a new set of philosophical-theological propositions, but rather a new context that demanded a greater link between the welfare of the individual and the structure of international relations. The combination of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and Nazi genocide galvanized the political will, and philosophical theology provided intellectual support for a greater emphasis on the inviolable dignity and universal rights of the human person.