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The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights
Author(s): Hans Joas (Author, Contributor)
- Publisher: Georgetown University Press
- Publication Date: 1 July 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1589019695
- ISBN-13: 9781589019690
Book Description
Conventional wisdom holds that human rights emerged from the spirit of the French Revolution, itself a political expression of the French Enlightenment, which was commonly seen as anticlerical and anti-Christian and antireligious. An alternative interpretation contends that the current human rights regime is the result of the Judeo-Christian tradition, paved by the understanding of the human person imparted by the Christian gospels. Drawing on sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber and Troetsch, Joas sets out a new path and proposes an alternative genealogy. He proposes that the modern belief in human rights and universal human dignity is the result of a process of “sacralization,” in which every single human being has increasingly been viewed as sacred. Two milestones of this process in the modern era, Joas points out, were the abolition of torture and slavery–common practices in the pre-18th century West. This process of “sacralization” culminates in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, demonstrating how values–what Joas calls value generalization–can shift over time and reflect human progress.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The widely respected sociologist Hans Joas has made something of a detour in his personal intellectual history and moved into the terrain of human rights-one of the hot areas in the humanities and social sciences, yet one of the most difficult to enter. He has made an original contribution. . . . For rights specialists and historical theorists, Joas’ book will be provocative.
Joas’s book is an erudite and provocative contribution to omipresent conversations about human rights, their history, and their justification. . . . The book will be of great consequence for religious studies scholars.
About the Author
Hans Joas is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, where he also belongs to the Committee on Social Thought, and at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he is a Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, School of History.
