1/ The first theoreticians of human rights were not wrong to refer to human nature. But it is the notion that they formed of it that was inconsistent. One knows today—one has known it for a long time—that man is a social being,
2/ that the existence of men did not precede their coexistence; in short, that society is the perspective in which, from its origins, the human presence in the world has been recorded. Just as there is no spirit that is not incarnated,
3/ there is no individual that is not situated in a determined socio-historical context. Membership in humanity is thus never immediate, but mediated: one belongs to it only through the intermediary of a particular collectivity or a given culture.
4/ It is impossible for man to define himself simply as an individual because he necessarily lives in a community, where he is connected to values, norms, shared meanings, and because the totality of these relations, these practices—
5/ in a word, everything that constitutes his living environment and surrounds his being, is not superimposed but, on the contrary, constitutive of his self. #Benoist
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