Human Rights, Anthropology of role in the struggle of both large and small rms to gain and sustain a competitive

advantage in the worldwide marketplace. This stage may be termed strategic partnership. Top management looks to the HR department, as it does to line managers, to control costs, to attract and retain top talent, to enhance competitiveness, and to add value to the rm in everything it does. uation in Work Settings; Psychological Climate in the Work Setting; Strategic Human Resources Management; Well-being and Burnout in the Workplace, Psychology of

Bibliography
Bell D 1972 Three technologies: Size, measurement, hierarchy. In: Davis L E, Taylor J C (eds.) Design of Jobs. Penguin, London Brayeld A H, Crockett W H 1955 Employee attitudes and employee performance. Psychological Bulletin 52: 396424 Cascio W F 1998 Managing Human Resources: Producti ity, Quality of Work Life, Prots, 5th edn. Irwin\McGraw-Hill, Burr Ridge, IL Cascio W F 2000 Costing Human Resources: The Financial Impact of Beha ior in Organizations, 5th edn. Southwestern, Cincinnati, OH Cohen S 1960 Labor in the United States. Charles E. Merrill, Columbus, OH Eilbert H 1959 The development of personnel management in the United States. Business History Re iew 33: 34564 French W L 1994 Human Resources Management, 3rd edn. Houghton Miin, Boston, MA Landy F J 1992 Hugo Munsterberg: Victim or visionary? Journal of Applied Psychology 77: 787802 Meyer H E 1976 Personnel directors are the new corporate heroes. Fortune 93: 848 Moskowitz M J 1977 Hugo Munsterberg: A study in the history of applied psychology. American Psychologist 32: 82442 Munsterberg H 1913 Psychology and Industrial Eciency. Houghton Miin, Boston, MA Pennock G A 1930 Industrial research at Hawthorne and experimental investigation of rest periods, working condi tions, and other inuences. Personnel Journal 8: 296309 Roethlisberger F J, Dickson W J 1939 Management and the Worker. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Van Riper P P 1958 History of the United States Ci il Ser ice. Row-Peterson, Evanston, IL

4. Learning From the Past, Looking Toward the Future

As noted earlier, the eld of human resource management is composed of ve broad activities that together constitute the HRM system: stang, retention, development, adjustment, and managing change. The eld as it is known today has emerged from nine interrelated sources: the industrial revolution, the emergence of free collective bargaining, scientic management, early industrial psychology, governmental personnel practices growing out of the establishment of the Civil Service Commission in the USA, the emergence of personnel specialists and the grouping of these specialists into personnel departments, the human relations movement, the behavioral sciences, and social legislation and court decisions. Since the 1950s, HRM has evolved through four growth stages: le maintenance, government accountability, organizational accountability, and strategic partnership. However, to be business partners who make genuine contributions to the success of an organization, HR professionals need to be proactive, not reactive. They must anticipate changes in the social, legal, political, and economic environments, and then facilitate eective organizational responses to them. Some of these issues include nding and keeping top talent in tight labor markets; capitalizing on the information revolution in ways that will benet organizations, such as Internet-based recruitment and the development of interactive, company-based intranets to facilitate employee inquiries and inputs; managing the performance of geographically dispersed employees and teams (virtual teams); and providing training and development opportunities on demand. Indeed, this is the new paradigm of work: any time, anywhere, in real space or in cyberspace. HRM will contribute to the bottom-line success of organizations and to the betterment of employee welfare by developing proactive responses to the workplace challenges wrought by this new paradigm. See also: IndustrialOrganizational Psychology: Science and Practice; Job Analysis and Work Roles, Psychology of; Job Design and Evaluation: Organizational Aspects; Labor Unions; Performance Eval-

W. F. Cascio

Human Rights, Anthropology of

Human rights constitute a eld of increasing anthropological concern, not only for its substance but also for its inherent tensions. Since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was internationally accepted, anthropology has moved from an explicit opposition to the idea of a universal standard of human rights, over a more routinely skeptical attitude to a growing positive interest of both an empirical and a theoretical nature. This trend is related both to changing notions of anthropology and to the historical process of globalization. (See 7007

Human Rights, Anthropology of Downing and Kushner 1988, and Messer 1993, and Hastrup 2001a, 2001b for overviews of the relationship between anthropology and human rights.) process, advice and comments were sought from various bodies, including the American Anthropological Association (AAA). A statement was produced by Melville Herskovits (1947) in the name of the AAA which carefully considers the idea of a universal standard and notes its local cultural implications, each of which is rmly anchored in contemporary anthropological knowledge. Noting that human rights appertain to the individual, the argument proceeds through the following successive conclusions: (a) The individual realizes his personality through his culture, hence respect for individual dierences entail a respect for cultural dierences (p. 541); (b) Respect for dierences between cultures is validated by the scientic fact that no technique of qualitatively evaluating cultures has been discovered (p. 542); (c) Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole (p. 542). This is clearly a stand against what was perceived as a Western bias in the UDHR, and it leads to the nal conclusion: Only when a statement of the right of men to live in terms of their own traditions is incorporated into the proposed Declaration, then, can the next step of dening the rights and duties of human groups as regards each other be set upon the rm foundation of the present-day scientic knowledge of Man (p. 543). What transpires is a profound skepticism, grounded in the state of the anthropological art, including the general professional sentiment that culture is the sole legitimate source of moral values. Herskovits expresses it thus: Even where political systems exist that deny citizens the right of participation in their government, or seek to conquer weaker peoples, underlying cultural values may be called on to bring peoples of such states to a realization of the consequences of the acts of their governments, and thus to enforce a brake upon discrimination and conquest (p. 543). As pointed out by Richard Wilson (1997, p. 2), this is an attempt to play anthropologys trump card: its unique ability to elicit and assert any cultures underlying values. In addition it could be said that it also features the comparative knowledge inherent in anthropology, a knowledge both of cultural dierence and of its translatability into valid, and more or less shared, human standards of good governance and respectable political action. In spite of the disclaimer, which was militantly underscored by Julian Steward (1948, p. 251), when he said we are prepared to take a stand against the values in our own culture which underlie such imperialism, the UDHR was passed in 1948. Together, the two attitudes exemplied by Boas and Herskovits, both of which are understandable and laudable, take us right to the core of anthropologys

1. Precursors
Although human rights, in the sense used here, were not on the international agenda before 1948, it was a latent idea for centuries, especially as far as civil rights were concerned. The American Bill of Rights (1776) and the French declaration on Les droits de lhomme et de citoyens (1789) are often cited as ancestors of the UDHR (along with others), and from there the roots of human rights are traced back to classical Athens or early Christianity. In the nineteenth century, when a wave of humanism swept over Europe, one of the results was a new idea of an essential humanity, deriving from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises in political philosophy as well as from sixteenth-century renaissance humanism. Political philosophy in many respects was a forerunner of anthropology that was to take shape in the late nineteenth century. The idea of a universal humanity was a precondition of the nascent discipline, destined to give the proposition about a shared humanity empirical substance by way of qualifying cultural dierences as variations upon the common theme of humanity. In the early ages of anthropology the conjunction of the two concerns of equal rights and local dierence is passionately testied to by Franz Boas, who, in his letter-diary from Ban Island (18834), writes about his sincere wish to live in the USA:
I should much prefer to live in America in order to be able to further those ideas for which I live. What I want to live and die for, is equal rights for all, equal possibilities to learn and work for poor and rich alike! Dont you believe that to have done even the smallest bit for this, is more than all of science taken together? (quoted in Cole 1983, p. 37)

We know that later Boas was to ght fervently against racism, and on the whole most anthropologists see their discipline as genuinely respectful of all peoples. This collective sentiment makes no simple entry into the discussion of a universal standard of human rights, however, as this is conceptualized and articulated in those declarations, conventions, charters, and protocols that have been passed in the decades following the UDHR.

2. Anthropological Reactions to the Uni ersal Declaration of Human Rights

Human rights in the modern sense were born in 1948 with the adoption of the UDHR. In the drafting 7008

Human Rights, Anthropology of comparative consciousness and its ambiguous implications. Since 1948, the discussion of the concept of human rights in anthropology has centered on the unsolved question of universalism or relativism (Dembour 1996). Another target has been the cultural translation of human rights concepts, allegedly deriving from a Western, and Christian, liberal democratic system, into like cultural concepts within other moral and political systems. This is neither an easy task (as shown by e.g., Wilson 1996, and Asad 1997), nor is it an obvious way to go (Hastrup in press). In actual practice the anthropological concern with human rights has taken various forms since 1948, and has been named accordingly as advocacy, activism, antiracism, and anti-imperialism. It is characteristic, though, that most of these trends have continued the relativistic attitude embedded in the AAA statement (and the implied skepticism toward human rights), while also advocating equal rights on the basis of a vision of a shared humanity. At the beginning of the twenty-rst century, when human rights are appealed to by the international community under the banner of a culture of human rights with increasing force, anthropologists have also taken a renewed interest in this culture. theoretically signicant conjuncture between anthropology and the human rights discourse. The culture of human rights is distinct also in its explicit acknowledgement of multiple sources. Whereas, traditionally, nations and other self-declared ethnic groups have referred to a particular genesis, an ultimate ancestor, or a culture-hero, the human rights culture draws upon all kinds of ancestry. As Mary Robinson (1998) puts it:
Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stands as ... one of the great documents in world history. The tra aux preT paratoires are there to remind us that the authors sought to reect in their work the diering cultural traditions in the world. The result is a distillation of many of the values inherent in the worlds major legal systems and religious beliefs including the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish traditions.

3. The Culture of Human Rights

The intense talk of human rights since the early 1990s is not necessarily a symptom of a high moral prole worldwide, rather it is a symptom of the malaises of the times and of the will to confront them by way of new international laws. The choice of cure reects a general process of legalization of culture in a postmodern era fraught with ontological insecurity, if we are to believe Anthony Giddens (1991). Where, earlier on, local cultures provided people with a sense of belonging and identity, the present globalization and fragmentation of identities have allegedly left people at a loss. They then look toward the law as the glue of community, whether local or global; the law is the new means of inclusion or exclusion par excellence. Whether it is possible to single out causal links in this complex process or not, we do experience an increasingly strongly articulated culture of human rights. We encounter this notion in most recent statements made by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, as well as by academics of various kinds (e.g., Rorty 1993). From an anthropological perspective it is a peculiar culture in the sense that it is declared rather than lived, and that it is future-oriented rather than based in tradition. As such it parts company from those cultures that were the traditional object of anthropology, but so does, indeed, anthropology itself, becoming increasingly concerned with connections between the local and the global, and their mutual implications. This provides a

Not surprisingly, after the demise of colonialism, and with the increasing critique of Eurocentrism and the hegemony of Western values, the search for roots has changed from the attempt at establishing a onestranded genealogy to suggesting multiple sources. Mary Robinsons statement may be empirically doubtful, but it goes to show that there is a will to shift whatever Western legacy one might like to trace in the human rights instruments to a truly global commitment. The declaration of a global culture of human rights is thus closely related to the historical process of globalization. In one sense, the notion of globalization simply states the obvious; due to increasingly rapid information and money exchange systems, we experience a timespace compression, that accounts for a new global consciousness. This global consciousness has important implications, one apparently being the appeal to a transcendent culture of human rights. To invoke a culture is also to invoke a shared language; as far as the human rights culture is concerned, the language is decidedly legal. As declarations the international charters are exemplars both of language and of law. Whether hard or soft law, it is inevitably an expression of particular ideas about society, while not necessarily embracing its total reality. Far from being simply rules for social behavior, law is part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real (Geertz 1983, p. 173). In the case of the international discourse on human rights, there is a concept of the modern nation-state as ' -vis the citizens, and a vision the responsible agent vis-a of an international community that transcends the more narrow interests of the states. Clearly, this community is no less imagined than the nation (cf. Anderson 1983). It is imagined in terms of precisely those international charters that are its main expression. As a literally declared culture, its language comes to carry a much heavier burden of representation than any natural language, being just one among other media for storing cultural knowledge. 7009

Human Rights, Anthropology of Any culture in some ways rests on representation; for it to be conceivable as a whole, it must be demonstrated as such. In a legal culture, such as the international culture of human rights, the representation becomes of a particularly reductive kind, because the experiences, by being represented as if on permanent trial in a courtroom, become subjected to an unavoidable process of reduction, or as Cliord Geertz has it about law in general, a skeletonization of fact, the reduction of it to the genre capacities of the law note (Geertz 1983, p. 172). Legal thought and vocabularies, then, are constructive of social realities rather than merely reective of them; this also applies to the legal vocabulary of human rights, and anthropologists naturally take an increasing interest in this particular social construction of a (global) community. According to some anthropologists, globalization and human rights conjoin in a social transformation of unprecedented magnitude. Ellen Messer, for one, writes like this:
Since the close of World War II, the United Nations has been assembling declarations, legislation, and enforcement mechanisms to promote human rights. Both the ongoing eorts to establish a global community and to base membership on a universal, but evolving standard of values constitute perhaps the greatest social transformation of this century. (Messer 1996, p. 1)

of analysis: the local worlds of people. This has fueled a new interest in what are known as cultural rights.

4. Cultural Rights
In view of the traditional anthropological ambivalence toward human rights, generally based in view of culture as an inviolable and inherently valuable entity, the notion of cultural rights might ease the tension. This is not self-evident, however. In the early instruments, such as the UDHR and the 1996 International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), cultural rights are individual rights to enjoy culture, in compliance with the general emphasis on individual rights and the obligation of the state to facilitate them. In addition to this focus on the individuals cultural rights, a more challenging (politically and theoretically) perspective on cultural rights is opening up with increasing force, however. This is a notion of collective cultural rights, in relation to which the individual enjoyment of culture gives way to, or is at least supplemented by, a right of a particular group to protect and develop their culture. It was notable already in the International Co enant on Ci il and Political Rights (ICCPR 1966, Article 27): In those States in which ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language. It is surprising, perhaps, that the protection of minorities is placed within the civil and political rights, and not the social, economic, and cultural rights; if nothing else, this conrms the lack of clarity with which the concept of culture is hampered in the international instruments. In spite of the weak beginnings and the unclear focus within the eld of cultural rights, there is an increasing interest in them at the beginning of the twenty-rst century. It is related to the historical fact that most conicts today are so-called ethnic conicts, at closer inspection often rooted in economic discrimination or scarce resources. Ethnic dierence often covers other inequalities, at least when they are expressed in conict. The ethnic conicts take place within states, that are the traditional duty-holders in the human rights system, and they raise endless new questions of how to dene those peoples, minorities, or indigenous populations that are the new beneciaries of collective rights. In spite of the denitional problems, the UN system proceeds toward an increasing proliferation of instruments dealing with collective rights. One such instrument is the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities (DM) of 1992. As a Declaration it is not legally binding in the strict sense of the term, but state signatories nevertheless commit

This transformation is part of a larger trend that has often been seen as the end of modernity, implying an end also to ontological security. This could be one of the reasons why human rights have become the new standard of hope to many. The historical changes are matched by new scholarly eorts. We have witnessed important changes in the conception of the anthropological object, that can be summed up under the rubrics of a de-essentialization of the object (culture, society) on the one hand, and a humanization of the subject, seen now to be an active agent of history, on the other. This facilitates a truly anthropological investigation into issues of human rights. Intellectually, one of the greatest advances of the twentieth century was a willingness to learn from history and anthropology that humans are extremely malleable (e.g., Rorty 1993, p. 115). Thanks to comparative knowledge of humanity in time and space we have realized the exibility and the self-shaping character of humans, and given up on the idea of a naturally rational animal. The historical and intellectual climate is thus very much in favor of achieving a human rights culture. While the dominant trends in present day anthropologythe stress upon globalization, on process, and on agency among other thingsmake a new approach to universal human rights possible, there is no theoretical reason why we should not at the same time maintain a distinct, more or less bounded object 7010

Human Rights, Anthropology of themselves to the spirit of the Declaration. In many ways the DM can be seen as an extension of Article 27 of the ICCPR quoted above:
States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity. (DM, Article 1) Persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, and to use their own language, in private and in public, freely and without interference or any form of discrimination. (DM, Article 2)

From an anthropological perspective, what seems problematic is the recurrent emphasis on peoples own culture as a natural property. The embedded concept of culture is an (outdated) essentialist one that goes counter to more recent anthropological notions of culture as a more or less temporary framework of understanding. In the 1993 Draft Declaration on Indigenous Peoples Rights (IPR) the notion of culture as essence is further cemented; to give just one example:
Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect, and develop the past, present, and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archeological and historical sites, artifacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies, and visual and performing arts and literature, as well as their right to the restitution of cultural, intellectual, religious, and spiritual property taken without their free and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions, and customs. (IPR, Article 12)

invalidated as a matter of course. The comparative perspective of anthropology itself is based on an idea of a shared humanity and a cross-cultural comprehensibility that tallies with the idea of equality and dignity in all humans. One of the things that anthropology has helped realize is the imaginability of others as somehow like us in spite of diversity. Ethnographies of violence and suering are still needed to add a dimension of experience to the (legal) language of rights, and thus contribute to a shared understanding of those suerings that a universally accepted standard of human rights may help alleviate. Not only ethnography, but also our regained condence in anthropological theory will contribute to the achievement of human rights, because anthropologys theoretical language can embrace cultural dierences within a single (scholarly) discourse. Theory expresses what is not otherwise said; as such it is a social practice and contributes to the making of the worldnot unlike the representation of society in legal terms, as discussed above. This imaginative contribution makes room for the renewed rapprochement between anthropology and human rights that we are witnessing. See also: Boas, Franz (18581942); Cultural Rights and Culture Defense: Cultural Concerns; Human Rights, History of; Human Rights in Intercultural Discourse: Cultural Concerns; Human Rights: Political Aspects; Oenses against the Laws of Humanity: International Action

Bibliography
Anderson B R OG 1983 Imagined Communities. Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London Asad T 1997 On torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In: Wilson R A (ed.) Human Rights, Culture and Context. Anthropological Perspecti es. Pluto Press, London, pp. 11133 Cole D 1983 The value of a person lies in his Herzensbildung: Franz Boas Ban Island letter-diary, 18831884. In: Stocking G W Jr (ed.) Obser ers Obser ed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, pp. 1352 Dembour M-B 1996 Human rights talk and anthropological ambivalence. The particular contexts of universal claims. In: Harris O (ed.) Inside and Outside the Law. Routledge, London, pp. 1940 Downing T, Kushner G (eds.) 1988 Human Rights and Anthropology (Cultural Survival Report 24). Cultural Survival, Cambridge, MA Geertz C 1983 Local knowledge: Fact and law in comparative perspective. In: Local Knowledge. Basic Books, New York, pp. 167234 Giddens A 1991 Identity and Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK Hastrup K (ed.) 2001a Human Rights on Common Grounds. The Quest for Uni ersality. Kluwer Law International, The Hague Hastrup K (ed.) 2001b Legal Cultures and Human Rights. The Challenge of Di ersity. Kluwer Law International, The Hague

While one cannot deny that the indigenous peoples have suered the more sinister eects of colonialism, it is unlikely that such collective rights that are propounded in the IPR will undo history. It is still only a draft declaration but seen in conjunction with the previously cited instrument there is evidence of a gradual transformation of cultural rights from individual to collective rights, that may potentially threaten the very foundation of human rights: their claim to universality. It seems, then, that at a time when anthropologists have left behind the notion of culture that prompted the AAA to take a stand against the idea of universal human rights, the very same notion hits back from within the system of human rights itself, potentially undermining it.

5.

New Anthropological A enues

The brief discussion of cultural rights shows that there is a need to reconsider the issue of human rights in the light of recent theoretical developments. If the notion of culture as essence is obsolete and cultural relativism generally self-refuting, human rights can no longer be

7011

Human Rights, Anthropology of

Hastrup K in press Anthropologys comparative consciousness: The case of human rights. In: Fox R, Gingrich A (eds.) Comparison in Anthropology. Routledge, London Herskovits M 1947 AAA statement on human rights. American Anthropologist 49: 53943 Messer E 1993 Anthropology and human rights. Annual Re iew of Anthropology 22: 22149 Messer E 1996 Anthropology, human rights, and social transformation. In: Moran E F (ed.) Transforming Societies, Transforming Anthropology. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Robinson M 1998 The Uni ersal Declaration of Human Rights: A Li ing Document. United Nations Press Release 27 January 1998 (UNHCHR) Rorty R 1993 Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality. In: Shute S, Hurley S (eds.) On Human Rights. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993. Basic Books, New York, pp. 11134 Steward J 1948 Comments on the Statement of Human Rights. American Anthropologist 50: 3512 Taylor C 1985a Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Wilson R A 1996 The Sizwe will not go away. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, human rights and nationbuilding in South Africa. African Studies 55(2): 120 Wilson R A 1997 Human rights, culture and context: An introduction. In: Wilson R A (ed.) Human Rights, Culture and Context. Anthropological Perspecti es. Pluto Press, London, pp. 127

K. Hastrup Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Human Rights, History of

The expression History of Human Rights has two dierent meanings. It can be understood (as it usually is) as the history of the idea and the concept of human rights, or (less frequently) as the historical occurrence and study of human rights and their abuses. Therefore, the basic debates about the idea and concept of human rights are rst claried here from a historical perspective. Then, a range of methodological and ethical problems in the historical study of human rights are presented.

1. History of the Idea and Concept of Human Rights

1.1 Moral s. Positi e Rights In 168990, just after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the English philosopher John Locke (16321704) wrote his Two Treatises on Go ernment, which contained the rst classical formulation of human rights (then still called natural rights). In retrospect, this work stood at the juncture of a set of amazingly diverse ideas, some of which went back to antiquity and some of which will survive the twenty-rst century. Lockes point of departure was the doctrine of natural law as it had developed since antiquity and had been 7012

transformed, in certain respects almost beyond recognition, by medieval Christianity and early-modern philosophers. According to Locke, the doctrine maintained that nature endowed all humans with certain basic moral entitlements (such as the right to life, liberty, and property), to which the man-made laws of society, both positive and customary, had to conform. These natural rights were thought to possess ve distinct characteristics: they were discoverable by reason, itself a faculty of human nature; they existed before humans entered society; they applied to all humans by virtue of their being human; they were inalienable; and they were restricted only by the recognition of the rights of others. As such, these rights limited the power of the societygenerally in its predominant historical-political form, the stateand its laws, and respect for them was the rst test for the legitimacy of political power. Ancient ideas on rationalism, equality, and the restrained exercise of power formed the substratum for this natural law doctrine, which proved to be very inuential. Despite its claim of eternity, however, many of the doctrinal components, such as the exact catalog of moral principles or the source of authority for these principles, turned out to be rather exible. Although temporarily in eclipse because of the ascendancy of the sixteenth-century absolutist state, the natural law doctrine would be fostered by three developments initiated in that very period. With the Renaissance came an emphasis on individualism and secularism, the outcome of the religious struggles following the Reformation taught the necessity of tolerance, and the seventeenth-century scientic revolution marked the triumph of rationalism. These developments reversed the philosophical priorities of the hierarchical medieval societies: natural law gradually became associated with rights rather than with duties and with individuals rather than with groups. The perception of the source of these natural rights also changed. Whereas Christianity had maintained that God was the ultimate source and political absolutism had invested the monarch with divine rights, the consent of the governed came to be seen as the nal authority. Individuals gave this consent in a social contract, which presupposed that they possessed rights before entering society. Governments owed their origin to that contract, by which free and equal citizens agreed to entrust to a neutral sovereign body some of their rights, to accept its authority and rules as long as it protected them, and to rebel against it if it did not. This formed the basis for the rule of law and the separation of, and balance between, the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government. Although previous theories (such as Hugo Grotius) paved the way and later ones expressed similar ideas, it was Lockes political theory which was to prosper, especially outside England. In the age of Enlightenment it exerted profound inuence upon the politicians behind the great revolutions at the end of the

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