ABSTRACT
Anyone who is interested in human rights and history is called upon to engage in, or form an opinion on, the rapidly escalating and rather divisive academic debate about what a correct history of human rights looks like. Is ‘our’ concept of human rights ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, newer than modern? Did it find its shape in the late eighteenth century, as Lynn Hunt and several others claim, or is it a much later product of political and religious debates in the twentieth century, with little or no conceptual connection to anything prior to that, as another main mover, Samuel Moyn, argues? Sources invoked in these interventions span political struggles and rhetoric, legal developments, activism, pamphleteering, etc. The historiography of human rights has become its own vibrant research field.1
