On August 25, 1914, three weeks after the invasion of Belgium (August 4) and two months after the fateful assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo (June 28), German troops entered the city of Leuven and destroyed its celebrated university library. Some 300,000 books and more than a thousand irreplaceable Medieval manuscripts were burnt along with the torching of 2,000 buildings and the killing of 248 civilians. The devastation was so intense that Dietrich Mahnke, a student of Edmund Husserl’s serving in the 75th Reserve Infantry Regiment, could still observe the city burning on August 27 as his company marched through the village of Korbeek-Lo a few kilometers northwest of Leuven. Outrage among intellectuals, politicians, and the public in Allied nations was swift.

This chapter argues that there are two key errors in the classical natural law tradition: first, that the ultimate end of all human actions is happiness instead of doing justice and loving the intrinsic good for its own sake; second, that our relationship to the good consists above all in desiring it, instead of giving goods an adequate response of will and heart. Grounding natural law on natural inclinations in this way commits the naturalistic fallacy: the moral ought is derived from facts about human desires. Drawing on realist phenomenology, the chapter secures natural law and human rights with an account of intrinsic objective values perceived by human reason. The intrinsic and objective value, or dignity, of human persons grounds a strict ethical obligation (natural law) to respect that dignity, and act with an appropriate value response. The appropriate value response is the object of a person’s fundamental human rights. The scope and hierarchy of human rights proceeds from this ethical obligation to respect human dignity in its various manifestations: ontological dignity, the dignity of conscious and rational persons, acquired dignity and bestowed dignity.

The third force movement, grounded in the principles of existential philosophy, focuses on the individual in quest of identity, values, and authenticity. The nineteenth century writings of such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey formed the background for the view of the person as alone and dehumanized. The twentieth century works of Sartre, Camus, and Jaspers offered further expression to the basic state of anxiety and absurdity. The personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Karol Wojtyła reintroduced the person within psychology. The methodological writings of Husserl and Heidegger contributed to the development of phenomenology as a means of investigating the holistic character of human experience. The combined existential–phenomenological psychology was an application of a new orientation in clinical settings, by such psychologists as Merleau-Ponty and Binswanger. In America, the humanistic viewpoints of Allport, Bühler, Maslow, May, and Rogers agreed generally with the European movement, and a center of existential-phenomenological psychology emerged at Duquesne University. Although it did not generate a comprehensive alternative to behaviorist formulations, the third force movement has exerted an impact on clinical applications, especially in therapeutic efforts.

Launched as a leftist vehicle for the presidential candidacy of Rafael Correa, the Alianza País (AP) dominated Ecuador’s electoral politics for a decade. Electoral success, however, was never paired with a democratically minded project of party building. Wielding expansive executive powers as president from 2007 to 2017, Correa consolidated his personal control over the AP and set the country on a course of democratic backsliding. Horizontal coordination among elites and operatives inside the party was enforced through a top-down command structure. Decisions about messaging, candidates, and discipline were tightly controlled by Correa and his inner circle of hand-picked loyalists. Eschewing grassroots participation in favor of technocratic governance, Correa systematically undercut independent groups in civil society and used executive-branch resources to subsidize select groups and maintain electoral support. For the most part, the AP was consigned to the sidelines, purposefully diminished by its leader. While mobilizing effectively for elections, the AP failed to develop as a conduit for citizen participation and interest representation. Rather than acting as a democratizing agent of change, the AP evolved into a caudillista-style vehicle reminiscent of personalistic parties in the country’s past.

This chapter reviews how the early post-Kantians perceived the need of reforming Kant’s Critique in order to complete the philosophical revolution it had initiated. In 1785, Jacobi had brought Spinoza to the discussion, claiming that his monism undermined human freedom and personality. He further claimed that this monism was the logical conclusion of all philosophy. The post-Kantians’ task was thus threefold: (1) to demonstrate that personalism is consistent which monism, which they in principle accepted as the necessary standpoint of reason; (2) to show that Kant’s idealism could be the basis for the desired personalism; and (3) to overcome what they took to be the formalism of Kant’s system that stood in the way of it. All this came down to ridding the system of its presumed unknown “thing-in-itself” while finding a principle that would unify it internally, not just by means of external reflection. Fichte had attempted this with his “I.” Even more important, however, was his analysis of feeling, which he considered the concrete counterpart of the “I” and which, as in the feeling of guilt, brought reason and nature together. This was the synthesis that the post-Kantian idealists explored in their different ways.

This chapter offers a brief history of how religious freedom has been conceptualized in international human rights law and politics after 1945, starting with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) Article 18 on the freedom of conscience, religion or belief, and ending with the aborted attempts in the 1960s to craft an international treaty on religious intolerance and discrimination. The chapter highlights how religious freedom over time became linked to a wider human rights discourse centered on combating different forms of structural injustice. It concludes with a set of critical reflections on recent attempts, including by the Donald J. Trump administration in the United States, to return to the “moral landscape” of the 1940s in order to salvage an allegedly natural right to religious freedom from the more comprehensive framework of human rights.

This chapter focuses on the author of the first formal philosophical study of human rights in the United States: William Ernest Hocking. This philosophical giant of the twentieth century shaped how Americans understood human rights through his writings and through his work with liberal Protestant institutions. By tracing his philosophical formation, his spats with philosopher John Dewey, his theories of the state, and his influence on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this chapter puts forward two arguments. First, Hocking’s trajectory shows us that American formulations of human rights were intertwined with debates about religious liberty. Second, liberal Protestants like Hocking disassociated human rights from specific references to Christian theology, which constituted a form of secularization. Hocking’s career offers a view onto the meaning of human rights in the twentieth-century United States.

This chapter details the seminal influence of Senegalese Catholic intellectual Alioune Diop on the Catholic Church between the 1940s and 1970s. A leading figure in the negritude movement who championed independence for Europe’s African colonies, Diop was also a devout Catholic who called on the Church to repudiate Eurocentrism and live up to its claims to be universal and embrace all peoples. He insisted that the Church had an important role to play in defending vulnerable peoples and promoting development in the “Third World.” Diop’s advocacy had a great impact during the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI and contributed to the reorientation of the Catholic Church during and after the Second Vatican Council.

Samuel Moyn has rightly argued that post–World War II notions of human rights were blended with incompatible notions of human dignity under Christian influence. However, where he sees a contamination of rights by dignity, I see the opposite. The modern Christian traditions around dignity were linked to a personalist politics that sought to refuse both liberalism and fascism and was not simply fascist-tending. The stability of the postwar settlements owed much to their influence. But that they have now broken down is somewhat to do with their over-dilution by liberalism from the outset.

This chapter introduces the main themes of this volume and its contribution to the existing scholarship on Christianity and human rights. Whereas the “classical” historiography on this subject has tended to focus on the much older origins of human rights – rooting them in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Protestant Reformation, or the Enlightenment and Age of Revolutions – this volume builds on a “new” historiography that focuses on the much more recent origins of human rights. The chapters explore the various interactions between Christianity and human rights theory in the twentieth century, not just in Europe and North America but also in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The introduction reflects on how this history changes our understanding of both human rights and the history of Christianity. It attends in particular to the ways that Christian accounts of human rights have supported but also contested the dominant liberal rights model and stresses the political ambiguities and internal diversity of Christian human rights discourse as it developed globally in the twentieth century.

The period between the French Revolution and the mid-twentieth century was a period of significant upheaval for Catholicism and in its interpretation of its role in relationship to the growth of nationalism, human rights and international relations. Chapter 1 examines how the Church developed Catholic social and political thought through human rights ideas. Catholicism gradually responded to the emergence of rights-based language, which it initially rejected, and only later engaged in active participation. Section 1.2 appraises in what manner the Catholic Church had available a long cosmopolitan tradition of reflection on the natural law, and this tradition in particular became a resource to a changing political landscape. Section 1.3 appraises the Catholics resolution of the tensions in rights language through the development of the philosophy of Personalism, and a reassessment of democracy as a foundation of cosmopolitan political life. This chapter concludes in Section 1.4 by presenting where those ideas were reaffirmed in later papal declarations and encyclicals.