The Rights of Man were grounded in a supposed human nature rather than history

Evidence

When the Rights of Man were proclaimed for the first time, they were regarded as being independent of history and the privileges which history had accorded certain strata of society. The new independence constituted the newly discovered dignity of man. From the beginning, this new dignity was of a rather ambiguous nature. Historical rights were replaced by natural rights, “nature” took the place of history, and it was tacitly assumed that nature was less alien than history to the essence of man. The very language of the Declaration of Independence as well as of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme—“inalienable,” “given with birth,” “self-evident truths”—implies the belief in a kind of human “nature” which would be subject to the same laws of growth as that of the individual and from which rights and laws could be deduced. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 728

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the foundational conceptual move of natural rights replacing historical rights, and the implied belief in a law-like human nature from which rights could be deduced.
• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings on how universalist claims (‘rights of man’) underlyingly encode particular exclusions; also echoes Agamben on the paradox of natural rights. — connects to: Human society is a historical reality that appropriates nature rather than submitting to it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 142; Human rights content results from political struggle, not nature or consensus; Paine grounded American rights in natural society, not British subjecthood. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 49 (+1 more)