“Human rights theory as we know it today [in the West] ... [flourished] and spread throughout the Enlightenment.”

—Fred Edwords

Human rights, as they are understood by the modern Western world, took almost exactly one century to develop. The events responsible for formalizing the concept of human rights include the Glorious Revolution, which in 1688 brought King William and Queen Mary to the English throne; Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776; the passage of the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1789; and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen by the French Constituent Assembly, also in 1789. Those one hundred and one years coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, a time when writers and philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire began to argue for the primacy of reason, science, and “natural rights”—rights that...