that has developed through history and that has, these days, many different institu-
tional manifestations.
12.2.1 Roots
Natural Law Background Historically, human rights can trace their origin to the
natural law tradition developed, among others, by the Stoics of Ancient Greece
and Rome and philosophers such as Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274). According to the natural law tradition, above positive law there
was a higher law, that applied to all mankind and to which positive law should conform.
More on natural law in Sect.14.5.
At the time of the Enlightenment, intellectuals such as John Locke (1632–1704)
and Thomas Paine (1737–1809) interpreted natural law principally as a set of rights,
making the similarity with modern human rights discourse very apparent. This
tradition influenced various political declarations (as opposed to legally binding
documents), some of which have acquired legal status with time. A prominent
example is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.
The first indisputablylegalfruit of this tradition, however, was theBill of Rightsof
the Constitution of the United States ratified in 1791.
12.2.2 Decline Under the Influence of a “Scientific” World View
On the ideological front, the natural law world view lost influence in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. In an era dominatedby scientific revolutions, natural law (and
natural rights by implication) seemed to reston unjustifiable metaphysical assumptions.
After all, natural rights are not things whose existence can be verified by scientific
means, and what the sciences do tell us is that ideas of what is right and wrong
vary across cultures and historical eras. In contrast, rising trends that were opposed
to natural law and natural rights, such as legal positivism, codification, utilitarianism,
and Marxism, all claimed to represent tough-minded, scientific points of view.
There is a line of thinking that extends from this era onwards, which views
human rights with suspicion, for instance, as impositions of western European
culture on equally justified traditional values or as fictions made by the privileged
few to constrain the demands of the many.
Situations that animate this suspicion can be found easily enough. For instance, there is the
so-calledLochner Eraof the United States Supreme Court, which takes its name from the
Lochner v. New Yorkcase (1902). During this period the Supreme Court, under the pretense
of protecting constitutional rights, invalidated progressive legislation that aimed at limiting
the working hours of laborers and at establishing minimum wages.12.2.3 Revival After the Second World War
The natural rights movement and its essentially cosmopolitan orientation experi-
enced a revival after the horrors of the Second World War. Prior to the war,
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