Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Progressivism and the Doctrine of Natural Rights

  • Edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Jeffrey Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Fred D. Miller, Jr, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
  • Book:
    Natural Rights Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy
    Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    27 August 2012, pp 177-195

  • Summary

    Progressive thinkers were revolutionary in their ends, not in their means. Political communities gravitate to a central principle of right. If, as Progressives asserted, the doctrine of natural rights was the reigning idea among the public, its elimination would create a vacuum. Progressives never doubted the primacy or ascendancy of the natural rights doctrine for the American Founders. These nineteenth-century critiques of the doctrine of natural rights, especially the challenge coming from Darwinism, were in the background when Progressives came on the scene. The doctrine of natural rights, at least within high intellectual circles, was already moribund, in large part because it could no longer draw on the prestige of science, as it had at the time of the Founding. When it comes to the question of foundations, liberalism is under challenge today from the outside and is troubled and conflicted from the inside.