Abstract

The historians of the Enlightenment have been underlining the historical foundation of contemporary human rights, their individual, political, universal, unalienable, indefeasible value, linking them to the rights of man of the Enlightenment. Instead, a recent revisionist historiography rejects their historical foundation, giving contemporary human rights a moral, anti-political, religious, national (of post-colonial states) value, with no historical roots, rejecting the existence of a history of human rights and avoiding its fundamental teachings. The debate is complex, because the historical-political problem is absolutely linked to the problem of lexis, and at the same time compelling, because the political dimension of the historical problem is more than ever evident.