Human Rights: Concept and Context

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Orend has divided his book into two parts: philosophical and historical.
His prose is always clear and occasionally humorous. A philosopher
himself, Orend devotes more than three-quarters of the book to the
question of rights: what they are or should be, who should have them,
and why one should have them. Although he does not use the term
“post-Christian age,” Orend indicates that modern philosophers
attempt to answer those questions without invoking the deity. With
rights go duties, which he also discusses.

The historical section devotes fewer than 50 pages, including endnotes,
to a discussion of the history of human rights in Western civilization.
Orend says that Western civilization and the Christian religion, at
least in theory, have placed greater emphasis than any other social
systems on human rights, and his history provides a good summary for the
uninitiated. While no brief summary can include all significant
developments, Orend appears to have a very good understanding of Ancient
Greece, the Roman Empire, the birth of Christianity, the Middle Ages,
Early Modern Europe, and the Revolutionary Period (1689–1789), as well
as the 19th and 20th centuries. He makes a strong case that John Locke,
the philosopher of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1689, inspired
Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence. In
turn, French assistance to the Americans bankrupted the French treasury
and provoked the French Revolution of 1789. Whether Orend grants too
much credit to Ronald Reagan for ending the Cold War is debatable, but
differences of opinion are bound to arise.

The American Bill of Rights (1789), the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (1948), and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982)
appear in the appendix, thereby making Orend’s book a useful reference
work.