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5 - Rights, Property, and Politics

Hume to Hegel

from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Richard Bourke
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter addresses the relationship between rights and property and the role of each in determining the form of government. It begins by challenging J. G. A. Pocock’s division of the history of political thought into liberal and republican traditions, with the first based on a juridical conception of politics and the second focused on political participation to the exclusion of a concern with rights. David Hume, whose skepticism led him to deny that justice was a natural virtue, traced property rights to an appreciation of their social utility. In addition, like Montesquieu, Hume denied any necessary relation between the degree of political participation in government and the security of rights. Edmund Burke accepted that fundamental rights were ultimately derived from nature, but objected to how the French revolutionaries ignored the role of prescription in stabilizing justice. Ultimately, Hegel broke down the distinction between rights and welfare, drawing on Rousseau and Kant’s emphasis on freedom as the true source of justice and humanity.

Keywords

sovereigntyjusticepropertyDavid HumeHegelMontesquieuEdmund BurkeThomas PaineImmanuel Kant
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 114 - 139
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bourke, R., Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Bourke, R., Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2023).Google Scholar
Fleischacker, S., A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Garnsey, P., Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hont, I., “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory,’” in Pagden, A. (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 253–376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, E., The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neuhouser, F., Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A., “Virtues, Rights and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,” in Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ripstein, A., Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sagar, P., The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Sonenscher, M., “Property, Community, and Citizenship,” in Goldie, M. and Wokler, R. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Stedman Jones, G., An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Tomaselli, S., Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuck, R., Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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