This impor collection brings together historians attempting to chronicle the contested path Enlightenment ideas about human rights took as they made their way across the centuries and into the heart of contemporary world politics. The authors are united in the conviction that the rise of human rights around the world was historically contingent and politically contested. The American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century generated a language of human rights, but this was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by the rival concepts of nation, race, class, and civilization. Hoffmann and his colleagues argue that it was only in the conflicts and crises following World War II that human rights became a universal moral ideal.