Human rights replaced religious and estate guarantees in secularized society.

Evidence

The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 706

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding theme of colonial psychology — rights as protections against new state sovereignty and new social arbitrariness resonates with how exclusion operates in modern bureaucratic rationality.
• DEFINE: Explains the historical function human rights were meant to serve.