The drafting of the Declaration in 1947–8 reminds us of the conditions in which social welfare came to be viewed as a human right. More than three decades on, the spectre of the Russian Revolution still haunted attempts to determine what was needed for human flourishing.

In March last year, only days after NATO’s military intervention in Libya, the French ‘New Philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy held a reception for Libyan insurgents at the Hôtel Rafael in Paris. Among the guests was Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who played a major role in popularising the so-called ‘right to intervene’ on humanitarian grounds.

In 2010, Slavoj Žižek, whom the New Republic once dubbed ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’, gave a public lecture at the London School of Economics on the necessity of communism. The audience at this elite university overflowed the auditorium into a nearby room, watching through a video link. At one point, the evening’s host, the international relations theorist David Held (also the PhD advisor to the son of Muammar Gaddafi), looked visibly agitated and managed to interrupt Žižek – itself something of a rare achievement.