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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 September 2015
Michael J. Perry's The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries is a major contribution to the clarification of the idea of human rights, which he considers to be, for many, the most difficult of all the influential moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century. He argues that it is, “in one form or another,” an “old idea” and opens his Introduction with a quotation from Leszek Kolakowski dismissing the assertion that “the idea of human rights is of recent origin.” For someone who is as ready to admit being a “secular enthusiast of human rights” as the author of this comment, Perry's denial of the fact that human rights constitute a recent phenomenon certainly “poses a problem.” The problem is really essential with regard to Perry's foundational conviction advanced in Chapter I, where he claims that the idea of human rights is ineliminably, inescapably, religious, and that so is the view that “every human being is sacred.”
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5. The classification of human rights in individual rights, collective rights and rights of the group as such is also the result of modern legal and political thought, although some precedents can be found in earlier treaties and in humanitarian intervention.
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8. Id at 18. Cohn provides some examples: prohibitions such as “thou shalt not steal” or “thou shalt not remove thy neighbor's landmark” may be read to imply a right to property and possession, nowhere spelled out as such; the duty of learning and teaching is reiterated, but there is no right to education articulated anywhere.
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10. Id at 19.
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16. Id at 105.
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