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Introduction: Natural Rights
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16315 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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3 / 1989 |
469 Words |
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The four essays that appear this month on the subject of natural rights address a common problem: To what extent can one still speak meaningfully about the seventeenth-century concept of right that underlies modern liberal and democratic institutions? Related to this question are other equally troubling ones. Is the notion of natural rights that developed in early modern Europe something already dated? To speak about the liberties that members of civil society bring with them from an alleged natural state and then put into a contract with their ruler may be to pay too much honor to the cultural and scientific horizons of an earlier age. Should we, knowing that humans have always lived in groups, embrace a questionable assumption for the sake of political happiness: namely, that society is the result of a negotiated settlement between individuals and their elected sovereign? Or is it possible to defend liberty and government by consent while rejecting the natural-rights thinking long associated with these ideas?
The four contributors included each deal with some of the questions posed above. Two of them, John Gray and Gary Herbert, return to Thomas Hobbes in assessing the continued value of the natural-rights tradition. Gray identifies Hobbes' sovereign state with is founding purpose, that is, to save individuals from the war of all against all. He insists that, despite Hobbes' reference to the state as a "moral god," what the philosopher wanted was a minimalist government. Hobbes advocated a state that protected life and curbed violence, not one that sought to reconstruct human nature. Herbert, by contrast, believed that Hobbes preferred government by conquest to one crated by the popular will. So fearful was Hobbes of popular dissension that he showed sympathy for conquerors who could maintain public peace. But the Hobbesian sovereign, according to Herbert, survives in the constitution that Americans chose as their mortal god. The Constitution was proclaimed as the unshakable foundation and final court of appeal for an American civil society.
The essays by Donald Livingston and Roger Scruton criticize natural-rights thinking in the context of interpreting David Hume and Otto Gierke. Livingston argues that Hume was the first philosopher to grasp that natural rights provided a shaky foundation for historical liberties. Indeed, Hume believed that liberties were endangered by being linked to the fiction of natural rights. Scruton cites the German jurist Gierke in making his own argument for the inescapably corporate nature of human relationships. Contrary to John Locke, who imagined society to be the invention of self-interested individuals, Gierke, through his histories of European law, underlined the
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