The Social Basis of Constitutionalism in Africa
- 1 September 1990
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Journal of Modern African Studies
- Vol. 28 (3) , 359-374
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x00054604
Abstract
Are human rights a western invention? Is their very conception, and the accompanying notion of a legal process that sets definite limits on the exercise of political power, an invention of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, and an ideological product of the French and the American Revolutions? And thus, is any talk of human rights in Africa tantamount to a mechanical importation of a western bourgeois ideological conception without the struggles and the relations that gave rise to it in the first place?Keywords
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