WORLD: Human Rights Without Illusions
Escaping the Moral Trap of Universalism
HRWF (01.09.2025) – In Human Rights Without Illusions, leading human rights advocate Aaron Rhodes traces the political and religious traditions that have led to prioritizing consensus among diverse nations as a prerequisite for upholding universal principles.
The modern, global human rights regime sits on the foundation of Hellenistic stoicism and medieval Christendom, where natural law morally unified all of humanity. Drawing upon subsequent efforts to implement a secularized law of nations as promulgated natural law, and inspired by political progressivism, the international human rights system initiated in 1948 envisions a process of moral transformation on the basis of bureaucratic cooperation with institutions of the United Nations.
By contrast, the natural rights tradition reflects a different form of universalism, one that focuses on a common understanding of human nature rather than intergovernmental consensus. The philosophy of natural rights, as crystallized in the Enlightenment, is skeptical of international formations, holding that interactions between governments occur in a state of nature without any overarching authority.
Therefore, protecting human rights is possible only in nation-states, where the rules of civil society are legally enforceable. That does not render futile a campaign for improving respect for human rights around the world, however.
Rhodes considers defending human rights and freedoms to be a moral duty, but human rights advocacy needs to free itself from the inevitable corruption of institutionalized universalism.
Rhodes argues instead for a “human rights without illusions” consistent with the classical liberal principles that inspired America’s Founding Fathers and shaped their belief that basic freedoms are realized in a bottom-up process, not a top-down one. Progress toward a spontaneous order of global human rights can be made if liberal societies project inherent freedom as a compelling moral principle, rather than subjecting it to legalistic rationalization and compromise in inclusive global institutions.
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Endorsements
In Human Rights Without Illusions, Aaron Rhodes chronicles how the West’s greatest political legacy—the notion of fundamental freedoms, grounded in natural law, Judeo-Christian ethics and Enlightenment reason—has been corrupted and displaced by the modern counterfeit of political universalism.
In exchange for its birthrights of liberty and virtue, the West embraced utopian visions that subordinate the individual to the demands of the state and a retinue of collectivist causes. With the crystalline prose and searing logic of a legal brief, Rhodes documents how ideas that emerged in anddefined the West became the means of its own “moral disarmament.”
His book is a clarion call to reject the top-down universalism of Rousseau and Kant and re-embrace the legacy of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Adams and Burke. Anyone who wants an honest appraisal of what the West has forfeited, and a roadmap for how to set things back on the right track, should read this book.
–A. Wess Mitchell, former US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs
Dr Rhodes is a rare presence in the international human rights world: a practitioner who has first-hand experience of that world and is prepared to challenge its orthodoxies. With a deep command of history and philosophy, Dr Rhodes offers a perspective that is both incisive and refreshingly honest. If we are to save this great moral idea from its many self-appointed clamorous champions, it is to people like Dr Rhodes that we must turn.
–Guglielmo Verdirame, member of the House of Lords and international law academic and practitioner
One of the leading international human rights activists, Aaron Rhodes is uniquely qualified to analyze the political and religious background of what is perhaps the most important yet also most misunderstood strategic and moral issue of our time: the defense and protection of individual freedom.
Dr. Rhodes has traced the evolution of liberal universalism that combines Hellenistic, Judeo-Christian, and Enlightenment values upon which the legal superstructure and assumptions of international human rights rests.
Explaining how this institutionalized universalism, and the self-interested, often cynical manipulation of idealistic goals by proponents of human rights lead tocorrosion of the principle of universality itself, he advocates for promoting natural rights in moral, rather than legal terms. This is a brave, clear, well documented, indispensable book.
–Juliana Geran Pilon, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization
While many of our political terms are contested, few are as confused as the notion of rights. In Human Rights Without Illusions, Aaron Rhodes draws on his distinguished career as both an activist and a scholar to bring some much-needed clarity to the issue.
He argues that the tendency to anchor rights in bureaucratic international institutions has major weaknesses and that human rights can really only be protected by states themselves, which alone have the authority and power to do so. It is an important and challenging book.
–Paul Marshall, Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, Senior Fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute and at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.
This book by human rights expert and advocate Aaron Rhodes is extremely timely and needed. He argues for human rights rooted in natural law, to be available to all, and not to be conflated with other societal needs. Human rights mean little if they include everything. And they also mean little if they have no transcendent foundation, based on universal human dignity. Some critics argue that human rights are “woke.”
Rhodes argues that human rights, rightly understood, are the basis for essential decency in every society.
Mark Tooley
President, Institute for Religion and Democracy
Human Rights Without Illusions sharply identifies where human rights activists and the international bureaucracy have gone off track and, ironically, damage the cause they claim to cherish. As Rhodes explains, valuing universal participation by governments over their actual observance and protection of human rights twists the international human rights system from a mechanism for freedom into a screen for oppression.
Rhodes spent years fighting for human rights as Executive Director of theInternational Helsinki Federation. Honesty compels him to lament the hollowness of the current dysfunctional system that falls so far short of its claims. His call for abandoning this pretense and revitalizing human rights by shoring them up in liberal societies and inspiring change elsewhere through example is well worth heeding.
–Brett D. Shaefer
American Enterprise Institute
