Beyond Human Rights

                 

Beyond Human Rights:
Defending Freedoms
Foreword by Eric Maulin
Arktos Media, 2011
118 pp

Read F. Roger Devlin’s review here

Beyond Human Rights is the second of Alain de Benoist’s book-length political works to appear in English. 

Alain de Benoist begins Beyond Human Rights with an examination of the origins of the concept of ‘human rights’ in European Antiquity, in which rights were defined in terms of the individual’s relationship to his community, and were understood as being exclusive to that community alone.

This changed with the coming of Christianity to Europe, after which rights were redefined as a universal concept derived from the idea of each individual as the possessor of a soul that is transcendent and independent of any social identity.

This culminated in the Enlightenment belief in ‘natural rights’, which found its practical expression in the doctrines emerging from the American and French revolutions, in which all individuals were said to possess rights simply by virtue of the fact of their being human.

In turn, laws issued by the State came to be viewed as negative impositions upon the naturally independent individual. Benoist deconstructs this idea and shows how the myth of a ‘natural man’ who possesses rights independent of his community is indefensible, and how this conception of rights has, in modern times, led to their use as a weapon by stronger nations to bludgeon those weaker states which do not conform to the Western liberal-democratic form of rights, as we have recently seen in action in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. As such, he presents us with a crucial critique of one of the major issues of our time.

CONTENTS

1. Are Human Rights a Part of the Law?

2. In Search of a Foundation

3. Human Rights and Cultural Diversity

4. Beyond Human Rights: Politics, Freedom, Democracy