ABSTRACT
Those who were marginalized from the political and economic process would eventually challenge their exclusion from prevailing conceptions of universal human rights. Hugo Grotius affirmed the rights of strangers and refugees — rights that would later be embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international legal documents. Despite Kant’s effort to defend universal collective responsibility to protect the needy from economic hardship, he entrusted, in the revolutionary spirit of his time, only “active citizens” — i.e., property-holding males — with the right to vote, as opposed to “passive citizens” — i.e., all females and men without property. The indigenous populations of the European colonies, African slaves, the propertyless, women, Jews (among other religious minorities), and their defenders would demand their full-fledged rights under the transforming rainbow of universalism. All citizens have the right to contribute to its making, either directly by themselves or through their freely elected representatives.
