ABSTRACT
A legal culture entrenching rights would define the norms around which the world consensus would supposedly crystallize. For the Western rights tradition also carries certain views on human nature, society, and the human good that are elements of an underlying justification. Some element of subjective right may exist in all legal systems. The peculiarity of the West was, first, that this idea played a bigger role in European medieval societies than elsewhere in history and, second, that it was the basis for the rewriting of Natural Law theory that marked the seventeenth century. The older notion that human society stands under a Law of Nature, whose origin was the Creator, and which was thus beyond human will, was now transposed. There is an outlook that converges on a policy of defense of human rights and democratic development, but that is rather different from the standard Western justifications of these.
