The Sacredness of the Person . A New Genealogy of Human Rights by Hans Joas

Excerpt

With his recent book The Sacredness of the Person, which is the English translation of the widely regarded German original from 2011, the social philosopher Hans Joas aims to explain how the belief in the idea of human rights as a set of universal values emerged in a particular historical setting. In fact, his study has the potential to have a stimulating effect on anglophone debates regarding the origins and legitimation of human rights. Joas’s core thesis is that the emergence and diffusion of the belief in universal human rights and dignity is best understood as a process of the sacralization of the person, that is, as a process through which the human person itself became valued as sacred. According to Joas, this process originated in the North American colonies of the late 18th Century, but it spread and was consolidated across the European continent shortly after. By arguing this way, he aims to rebut the two persistently dominant views: that human rights are either the product of the secular humanist tradition of European Enlightenment, culminating in the anti-religious impacts of the French Revolution, or that the idea of human rights and dignity emerged directly from the Catholic belief in the “human being as image of God”. At the same time, however, Joas does not try simply to reconstruct what he thinks is the most accurate history of the origins of human rights. With the methodological help of “affirmative genealogy” which is supposed to bridge the gap between historicism and normativity by combining historic narration with substantiating argumentation, he also wants to renew their legitimizing foundation. Only if we remember the innovative nature of the emergence of human rights and the (allegedly) inherent meaning that stems from their historic origin, he claims, will it be possible to preserve and strengthen the values of human rights under contemporary conditions (134–135). …