Some Intellectual and Social Roots of Modern Human Rights Ideas

My purpose here is to identify selected turning points of western thought as they interacted with critical turning points in social organization, to shape the "deep trajectory" of social presupposition necessary for the rise of modern, Western principles of human rights. The deeply religious aspects of both thought and societal structure are involved at each juncture. In the process of exhuming these presuppositions from the Western traditions, several questions arise for the scientific study of religion, and for the relationship of scholarship to the ethical basis of modern civilization.