ABSTRACT
The idea of universal human rights is rooted in the Stoic, natural-law philosophy which held that all human beings belonged to two cities: the local community in which they carried on their everyday lives, and the human community of which they were members by virtue of their humanity. Both these cities gave rise to ethical relations. This philosophy was transferred into the mainstream of Western civilization by Christianity, which has taught that the status of all human beings as children of God is ethically more fundamental than their status as members of particular nations. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this idea was combined, in Western thought, with notions of property rights, derived from Roman law, and secularized to become the doctrine that all human beings have certain ‘natural rights’. The new doctrine was launched dramatically onto the stage of world history by the American and French revolutions.
