The chapter opens by questioning whether human rights represent mere rhetorical nonsense, as philosopher Jeremy Bentham claimed, noting the long gap between 18th-century declarations and the 1948 Universal Declaration. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, discussions of rights occurred almost exclusively within national frameworks. Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini captured this shift by defining a country as the place where individual rights are most secure. Two devastating world wars would ultimately shatter this confidence in the nation-state.

After 1815, nationalism gradually displaced the Revolutionary-era conflict between universal rights and traditional hierarchy. Edmund Burke argued that rights must grow from historical tradition rather than metaphysical abstractions, predicting in 1790 that abstract declarations would require violence to sustain. The French Terror of 1793-1794 seemed to prove him correct. As the Revolution radicalized, enthusiasm waned; Thomas Paine fled Britain in 1792 after sedition charges, while the United States passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Scottish mathematician John Robison called the obsession with rights the greatest bane of life, and conservative philosopher Louis de Bonald blamed the Declaration on Enlightenment philosophy, arguing that only restored monarchy and Catholicism could provide moral order.

Napoleon’s regime created contradictions: promoting religious tolerance and legal equality while suppressing political freedoms. He restored slavery in French Caribbean colonies, succeeding everywhere except Saint-Domingue, which became independent Haiti after tremendous bloodshed. As many as 150,000 people died in the fighting on Saint-Domingue alone. Writer Germaine de Staël dismissed Napoleon’s legacy as refining the techniques of tyranny.

Napoleon’s imperialism inadvertently catalyzed nationalism from Poland to South America. Leaders like the South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar embraced the revolutionary spirit as providing the emotional force Burke found lacking in abstract declarations. By contrast, German nationalist Friedrich Jahn developed an ethnicity-based nationalism centered on the Volk, arguing for “racial purity” as the basis of national identity and envisioning an expansive German empire. Early nationalists often embraced democracy and universalism, but the 1848 revolutions failed when nationalists denied self-determination to minorities within their proposed borders. Nationalism then shifted rightward, becoming increasingly defensive and xenophobic as nations struggled with ethnic heterogeneity and immigration pressures.

The 19th century witnessed an explosion of biological explanations for difference. As arguments for universal equality emerged, opponents developed scientific doctrines of inherent hierarchy. French physiologist Pierre Cabanis argued that women’s biology suited them for domestic roles, while philosopher John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) countered that the idea of women’s “nature” was socially constructed. Women gained suffrage slowly: Australia in 1902, the United States in 1920, Britain in 1928, and France in 1944.

Racism similarly took scientific form. Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55) proposed a biological hierarchy with “Aryans” supreme. German Emperor Wilhelm I embraced these ideas, which influenced artists and intellectuals, including the German composer Richard Wagner and, ultimately, Adolf Hitler. Antisemitism intensified in the late 19th century. The Dreyfus Affair (beginning in 1894) divided France when Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of espionage; novelist Emile Zola’s defense of Dreyfus sparked riots by the Anti-Semitic League. Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906, after enduring years of captivity in horrific conditions on the remote Devil’s Island, French Guyana. Karl Lueger won Vienna’s mayorship in 1895 on an antisemitic platform. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) cast Jews and “Aryans” in a death struggle for “racial purity.” The fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) fueled conspiracy theories.

Socialism and communism critiqued rights from another angle. Early socialists like Charles Fourier prioritized the right to work over political rights. After universal male suffrage emerged, socialists split between parliamentary reformers and revolutionaries. French Socialist Party founder Jean Jaurès endorsed individual rights alongside workers’ interests, but Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” (1843) condemned rights as serving the egoistic individual and protecting private property. The Bolsheviks’ 1918 declaration included no political rights, and Vladimir Lenin argued that equal rights perpetuated bourgeois exploitation. Joseph Stalin’s 1936 constitution claimed to guarantee freedoms while his regime murdered hundreds of thousands.

World War I’s catastrophic death toll led to the League of Nations (1919), which ultimately failed. World War II produced 60 million deaths, including 6 million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust. The Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) established accountability for crimes against humanity. The United Nations, founded in 1945, initially resisted including human rights until pressured by smaller nations and nongovernmental organizations. Eleanor Roosevelt led the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in drafting a declaration based on a preliminary text by Canadian law professor John Humphrey. On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its preamble cited “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,” a deliberate shift from the “ignorance” or “neglect” mentioned in the 1789 French Declaration. The Declaration combined traditional political rights with new social and economic rights, setting a moral standard without enforcement mechanisms.

19th-century benevolent societies, especially antislavery organizations, had sustained universalist ideals during nationalism’s dominance. The 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, established patterns for international advocacy, while its refusal to seat female abolitionists helped precipitate the women’s suffrage movement. Post-1948, anticolonial struggles initially overshadowed human rights work, but international consensus gradually formed. Western European Communist parties endorsed rights in the 1970s; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in 1988 that the USSR become a rights-protecting state under law. Non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch gained influence from the 1980s onward, though violations persist.

A modern paradox emerges: Mass media enable empathy across geographic distance, yet intimate violence continues, as in Rwanda. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) argued that conscience, not empathy alone, motivates moral action. The chapter suggests human rights inadvertently stimulated the growth of “evil twins”—ideologies of difference and the sensationalization of violence, exemplified by Gothic novels and the Marquis de Sade’s pornography of pain. The struggle over rights continues across contested domains: abortion, euthanasia, disability rights, LGBTQ rights, children’s rights, and animal rights. The chapter concludes that the human rights framework, though imperfect and slow, remains the most viable structure for confronting these challenges. Protestant pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne recognized in 1787 that violations of widely known rights had become unacceptable. Human rights truths remain self-evident because we feel distress when they are violated, despite the paradox of this circular reasoning.