Abstract

Luo Longji was a political scientist who spent seven years studying in England and America, culminating in a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1928. Together with Hu Shi and Liang Shiqiu, he published a number of articles on human rights in the magazine Xinyue in 1929 and 1930. The present essay stands out as the most theoretically sophisticated of the numerous Xinyue articles. Luo draws on a number of themes and concepts he learned from mentors in the West, most especially from Harold Laski, whose social liberalism Luo found very appealing. Unlike earlier generations of thinkers, Luo rarely engages explicitly with the earlier Chinese tradition; in this he resembles Gao Yihan more than anyone else represented in the present collection. Both saw themselves as engaged with ideas relevant the world over, rather than with China's specific cultural situation. We translate here the first two sections of Luo's article, wherein he sets down his fundamental theoretical position. In the balance of the article, he addresses more specific aspects of human rights in the following sections: "Human Rights and the State," "Human Rights and the Law," "The Temporal and Spatial Characters of Human Rights," and "The Human Rights that We Would Like."