The fortunes of natural man : Robinson Crusoe, political economy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

What is at stake here,' the Lebanese United Nations delegate Charles Malik wrote of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 'is the determination of the nature of man.' As a student of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Malik was intensely attuned to the philosophical significance of the attempt to formulate a list of basic rights. Reflecting on his own participation in the drafting process, Malik, who drafted the declaration’s preamble, noted that this posed three central questions: Is man an animal like any other? What is the place of the individual human person in modern society? And which is prior, the individual or the state? Unsurprisingly, these questions came to the fore during debate in the General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee about what is now Article 29 of the Declaration, which concerns the relation between the individual and the community. More surprisingly, this debate revolved around the figure who epitomizes the myth of 'natural man': Robinson Crusoe.