The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism Samuel Moyn In the course of 1948, debates around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), to be ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in December of that year, gained some traction in European public consciousness.1 Human rights did not become so prominent as to define any live public option for politics in either the domestic or international spheres; notably, no movement self-consciously constructed in the service of human rights within or across borders appeared. But it is true that some people noticed the concept. One was the great German classicist, professor at the University of Hamburg, Bruno Snell. When revising an essay for its inclusion in The Discovery of the Mind (one of the most celebrated books of the mid-century humanities across the Atlantic world), Snell added the following remarkable passage: “Euripides, in his Medea, is the first to portray a human being who excites pity by the mere fact of being a human being in torment. . . . As a barbarian she has no rights, but as a human being she has. This same Medea is also the first person in literature whose thinking and feeling are described in purely human terms. . . . No sooner does man declare his independence of the 1. This essay originated as a lecture in both the Around 1948 and International Women’s Human Rights Sawyer seminars at the University of Chicago on 29 November 2011, and the text sticks clo ...
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