Human rights became an exceptional right for the underprivileged.

Evidence

The failure of all responsible persons to meet the calamity of an ever-growing body of people forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law with the proclamation of a new bill of rights was certainly not due to ill will. Never before had the Rights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by the French and the American revolutions as the new fundament for civilized societies, been a practical political issue. During the nineteenth century, these rights had been invoked in a rather perfunctory way, to defend individuals against the increasing power of the state and to mitigate the new social insecurity caused by the industrial revolution. Then the meaning of human rights acquired a new connotation: they became the standard slogan of the protectors of the underprivileged, a kind of additional law, a right of exception necessary for those who had nothing better to fall back upon. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 712

Categorization

• DEFINE: Charts the semantic drift of ‘human rights’ from fundament of civilized society to exception for the underprivileged — a definitional shift central to the scaffold.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit on representation — how a universal claim becomes a residual category for those outside normal citizenship. — connects to: The NIEO’s architect embraced human rights beyond liberal individualism. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 419