The Religion of Human Rights: Part 1

by Alain de Benoist

This is the first part of excerpts from Alain de Benoist’s timeless essay ‘The Religion of Human Rights’, published in 1988, in which he explores the relationship between individual freedoms and collective identity.

Regarding the abstract rights of a person, we know nothing — and can know nothing. The ‘universal’ human does not exist.

What does exist, however, is a zoological unity of the human species; strictly speaking, the human species constitutes ‘humanity’. Such a concept has a purely biological meaning. We do not believe, however, that humans can determine their essence based on their biological characteristics. We are rather of the opinion that what makes humans specifically human, i.e., what grounds and constitutes humans as humans, emerges from culture and history.