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4 - Enlightenment Theories of Rights

from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Céline Spector
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 proposes an alternative to the more economically driven historiography on French Enlightenment rights talk, by highlighting the role of philosophers, most notably Locke and Rousseau. It was their insistence on the inalienability of liberty that defined the philosophical discourse of rights in the eighteenth century. Locke repudiated the standard argument by natural lawyers (from Grotius to Pufendorf) that we could alienate our freedom, either by selling ourselves into slavery or subjecting ourselves to an absolutist sovereign. In both of these cases, we violate our right to self-preservation, which as a dictate of natural law is sacrosanct. Montesquieu similarly rejected Roman arguments for slavery in the name of self-preservation. And Rousseau insisted on the inalienability of liberty, through an operation (the social contract) that transforms natural liberty into political freedom. These arguments, too, informed the revolutionary understanding of human rights.

Keywords

John LockeBarbeyracnatural rightslibertyJean-Jacques RousseauMontesquieuslaverypropertysocial contractinalienable rightsEnlightenment
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 93 - 113
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Baker, K. M., “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in Van Kley, D. K. (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 154–96.Google Scholar
Edelstein, D., “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” Journal of Modern History 86 (2014), 530–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelstein, D., On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2019).Google Scholar
Gauchet, M., La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris, Gallimard, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauchet, M., “Rights of Man,” in Furet, F. and Ozouf, M. (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Hunt, L., Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, Norton, 2008).Google Scholar
Korkman, P., “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Human Rights in Barbeyrac and Burlamaqui,” in Mäkinen, V. and Korkman, P. (eds.), Transformations in Medieval and Early-Modern Rights Discourse (Dordrecht, Springer, 2006), pp. 257–83.Google Scholar
Rials, S., La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Paris, Hachette, 1988).Google Scholar
Tuck, R., Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, K., “National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the Declaration of Rights,” in Van Kley, D. K. (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 199–233.Google Scholar

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