El mito de los orígenes: modelos historiográficos de los derechos humanos

The question «What are human rights?» ought to be answered not only by defining their entity and their normative relevance, but also by explaining how they have become what they are for us. Human rights are the result of causalities, historical conjunctures and an emerging configuration of cosmological, anthropological and social imaginaries in which they find or lose their meaning. In this regard, the history of human rights is not a subsidiary element for its analysis. History establishes human rights as objects for a theoretical analysis. Human rights do not exist without their history, and the story that we tell about their origin and evolution circumscribes their horizon of meaning. In the present article, I analyze three historiographical models whose perspectives give rise to three competing visions about the past, the present and the future of human rights.