The Right to Think as the Foundation of the New Human Rights

Abstract

In 2020, Jean-Pol Martin proposed a re-foundation and reformulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Instead of deriving human rights from metaphysics, religion, natural law, or idealistic philosophical anthropology, the model grounds them exclusively in observable human needs and the functional conditions of living organisms. The 2020 text represents a decisive stage in the development of the New Human Rights. It already contains their central architecture: the rights to thinking, health, security, social inclusion, self-realization and participation, and meaning. Its most distinctive contribution is the formulation of thinking as a fundamental human need and consequently as a human right. This working paper reconstructs the theoretical and historical significance of the 2020 text from the perspective of the model’s subsequent development. It shows that the later organism-based framework did not emerge abruptly. Its essential structure was already present in the earlier formulation, although the concepts and their relationships were later clarified and integrated more systematically. The paper identifies the right to think as an integrating right: access to information, information processing, conceptualization, cognitive-map formation, participation, and collective problem-solving are necessary for the realization of all other fundamental needs.