Introduction

This chapter describes briefly the career of the doctrine of human rights in the century or so since the publication of these attacks. It concentrates on some of the outstanding themes in the critique of human rights and of the liberal rights tradition, particularly as those themes have been taken up by theorists and philosophers who call themselves the new communitarians. Unlike the League of Nations, the United Nations Organisation committed itself immediately to the rights of man, taking as one of the basic aims of its foundation 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. Human rights represent entitlements and generate duties that are said apply to all men and women, at all times, and in all the circumstances and societies in which they live.