Philosophical Roots and the Drafting of the UDHR

The modern idea of human rights owes much of its philosophical vocabulary to the natural rights tradition of the European Enlightenment. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), the English philosopher John Locke argued that individuals possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property that exist prior to and independently of government, and that political authority is legitimate only insofar as it protects those rights and rests on the consent of the governed. This departed from Thomas Hobbes, who in Leviathan (1651) had also posited a state of nature but concluded that individuals must surrender their rights almost entirely to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order. Later Enlightenment thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract (1762) theorized legitimate political authority as an expression of the general will, and Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) argued for the separation of powers as a safeguard against tyranny, further shaped the intellectual foundations on which later declarations of rights would draw.