History Of Human Rights

• Though ideas of rights and freedom have existed for a great deal of human history, it is indistinct how much such liberties can be described as "human rights" in the current sense. The concept of rights positively existed in pre-modern cultures; ancient philosophers such as Aristotle wrote extensively on the rights (to dikaion in ancient Greek, roughly a "just claim") of society to property and contribution in public affairs.


However, neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any idea of widespread human rights; slavery, for example, was acceptable both in ancient and modern times as a natural condition. Medieval charters of liberty such as the English Magna Carta were not charters of human rights, let alone general charters of rights. They instead constituted a shape of partial political and legal harmony to address specific political situation, in the case of Magna Carta later being mythologised in the path of early modern debates about rights.