Abstract

Norberto Bobbio introduced the expression “age of rights” to indicate the idea of an universal consensus on some values which can be interpreted as a signum prognosticum – in kantian terms – of mankind’s moral progress. The symbolic starting point of this age is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in 1948. In this paper the expression “the end of the age of rights” is value free and it is used to sign the replacement of the model of social organization imagined by Bobbio and many others after the second world-war in favour of a different model according to which human rights become a sort of lingua franca. As a consequence, it is not paradoxical at all to decree the end of the age of rights in presence of a public discourse crowded with rights