Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
What are the origins of the idea of human rights and universal human dignity? How can we most fully understand--and realize--these rights going into the future? In The Sacredness of the Person, internationally renowned sociologist and social theorist Hans Joas tells a story that differs from conventional narratives by tracing the concept of human rights back to the Judeo-Christian tradition or, alternately, to the secular French Enlightenment. While drawing on sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Ernst Troeltsch, Joas sets out a new path, proposing an affirmative genealogy in which human rights are the result of a process of "sacralization" of every human being.
According to Joas, every single human being has increasingly been viewed as sacred. He discusses the abolition of torture and slavery, once common practice in the pre-18th century west, as two milestones in modern human history. The author concludes by portraying the emergence of the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 as a successful process of value generalization. Joas demonstrates that the history of human rights cannot adequately be described as a history of ideas or as legal history, but as a complex transformation in which diverse cultural traditions had to be articulated, legally codified, and assimilated into practices of everyday life. The sacralization of the person and universal human rights will only be secure in the future, warns Joas, through continued support by institutions and society, vigorous discourse in their defense, and their incarnation in everyday life and practice.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
In The Sacredness of the Person, internationally renowned sociologist and social theorist Hans Joas argues that human rights are the result of a process of "sacralization," in which every single human being has increasingly been viewed as sacred.