Samuel Moyn's historical research on "human rights" has shown that communitarianism emerged in continental Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as a reaction to modern atomistic individualism, and that this communitarianism was instrumental in making the then completely marginalized idea of "human rights" the dominant normative concept in the West. Drawing on a variety of sources, Moyn shows that the idea of human rights in interwar continental Europe was not linked to a revolutionary or republican heritage, and that it was the initially conservative and anti-liberal concept of "personalism" that made human rights acceptable on the continent.
Tomohiro Tsukamoto, on the other hand, has argued that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theories of children's rights were actively promoted in societies outside the European continent, including Russia, Poland, Japan, Korea, and the United States.
The above studies on the history of human rights provide a different perspective from the conventional Western-centric linear view, which posits that the concept of human rights became a universal norm for all individuals after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, through the Holocaust in the Second World War.
In other words, while in Western European societies after the French Revolution there was a growing resistance or criticism of human rights as an ahistorical, individualistic concept, and the notion of human rights was marginalized, non-Western societies played a role in developing and disseminating the concept of "human rights".
Alternatively, it can be argued that the concept of human rights took different paths of development in both Western and non-Western regions, culminating in universal "world" human rights symbolized by the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" after World War II.
This workshop engages in a comparative philosophical examination through a juxtaposition of East Asia and Western Europe, focusing on the intellectual frameworks that have shaped the conceptualization of "human rights". In this workshop, I present my study of the ideological foundations of Jacques Maritain, a philosopher who is credited with contributing significantly to the mainstreaming of the concept of "human rights" in Western European society at the time, and Toyohiko Kagawa, who worked to promote "human rights" in pre-war Imperial Japan. I will also introduce Prof. Yanghee Lee's study of Bang Jeong-Hwan, the Korean pioneer of children's rights who led the establishment of Children's Day in Korea under the occupation of Imperial Japan.
The workshop aims to collect different trajectories of the development of the concept of "human rights", focusing on the comparison between the West and East Asia.