Self-Evident Truths?: Human Rights and the Enlightenment (The Oxford Amnesty Lectures)

The keywords of the Enlightenment—freedom, tolerance, rights, equality—are today heard everywhere, and they are used to endorse a wide range of positions, some of which are in perfect contradiction. While Orwell's 1984 claims that there is one phrase in the English language that resists translation into Newspeak, namely the opening lines of that key Enlightenment text, the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self—evident, that all men are created equal...', we also find...