The philosophical, legal theoretical and branch-specific legal aspects pertaining to the issue of human rights limits and restrictions have repeatedly been in the focus of consideration both in Ukrainian and foreign law. In particular cases, such investigations directly touched the issue of entrenchment of the foundations for human rights restriction in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the document the provisions of which have long been accepted as the provisions of customary international law and its universally recognized principles. Although this act provides only for the most general framework of the foundations and practical legal principles for human rights restriction, the Declaration’s doctrinal and practical role in defining the general principles of lawful restriction of human rights cannot be underestimated. It is the need for clarification of this role that makes relevant the study of juridical and applied aspects of human rights restrictions contained in the Declaration. Consideration of the institution of lawful human rights restriction as an element of the compositional structure of this international document allows to reconsider this institution’s philosophical foundations which usually remain disregarded by the branch-specific legal studies. The purpose of the article is to identify the social and aesthetic foundations of the institution of lawful human rights restriction and to clarify the juridical technicalities pertaining to the entrenchment of the general terms of their lawfulness in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Owing to the combination of the dialectical, structuralistic and hermeneutical methodological approaches used to study the Declaration, the author revealed in this document the socio-aesthetic components of the institution of human rights restriction. The aesthetic logic according to which the Declaration’s provisions on human rights restriction are constructed serves as the context into which each situation should be placed when it comes to the balancing of an individual’s specific interests with the interests of maintaining public and international order. What is meant here is the order in which individual interests may be secured as typical ones and with due regard for the significance of other social interests. The author comes to a substantiated conclusion that the ideas of personalism as a kind of communitarian social philosophy belong to the ideological origins of the institution of human rights restriction in the Declaration. The ideal of social harmony interpreted in personalistic terms is consistent with the principle of balance of the value of an individual’s free development with preservation and reproduction of integrity of the community which is a necessary condition for ensuring such development, and also the interconnectedness of human rights and social responsibilities. The method of explication of the human rights restriction regulations of the document under study is a component of the overall compositional harmony in its structure which correlates with the personalistic foundations of social harmony, these regulations serving as its manifestation, and the social ideal of the new world constructed in the Declaration is manifested in legal harmony.