assignment 4 by Brittany Thomas
In the reading Moyn expresses how religion had a lot to do with the formation of what is considered to be ” human rights” I found that this text does not exactly point out in a clear way what the differences between human rights and the rights of man are, so as I was reading I had to pick key elements out and draw my own conclusions but in my opinion, the fact that religion had a lot to do with the formations of these two topics it is strange to me that they still exclude so many aspects of different “humans” such as slaves, women , non-property holders ect were excluded when the rights of man was constructed. This reading ties into everything we have read so far in the since that we have talked about exclusion playing a heavy part in these constructions of rights and human rights , the rights of man and universal rights. Exclusion says that only a select few get to have rights and if people are excluded from something that should be for all humans then those people must not be “real humans”. To be influenced by religions and to still be so harsh and exclusive to specific types of people could make one questions the religion and its message all together. However as explained in the reading, once Christianity came into the picture it spread from city to country, from place to place offering a message of hope but in its travels to these different places it was interpreted and understood in many different ways and what was universal became specific to the individual place which is why rights for humans were realized and followed in different ways. The French said that the human claim to “natural rights” were false and pretend which birthed the reinvention of rights by Burke and was formed into the “Rights of man”. On page twenty nine it says that the rights of man and human rights show no relationship to each other or gives evidence that all humans are from the same group. I don’t think that there is a yes or no answer to todays question, Moyn shows how both human rights and the rights of man have similarity in which both speak to or about specific groups of people and how they tell of different liberties granted to these people but are different in how the “rights of man” really speaks to men (white men) while “human rights” speaks to “all men” including women. These rights have since not changed but rather society has changed the way they view these rights.
