Republican Human Rights. On the Centrality of Power in 18th century Rights Philosophy

Is there a “correct” history of human rights and what would it look like? Is ‘our’ concept of human rights ancient, medieval, early modern, modern? Did it find its shape in the late eighteenth century, as Lynn Hunt (2008) claim, or is it a much later product of political and religious debates in the twentieth century, with no conceptual connection to anything prior to that, as Samuel Moyn (2010), argues? In moral philosophy, history tends to be used in order to make it credible that there is a tradition of human rights as a moral idea that transcends national boundaries, a moral idea tightly spun around the moral dignity of the human person. There certainly has been a shift from ‘politics of the state to the morality of the globe’ (Moyn, 2010, 43). Rather than figuring in constitutional principles of the political life of a polity, “human rights” has come to serve as the name of a state- and politics-transcending ethical position on the moral status of the human person. The philosophy of James Griffin (2009) is an example. He is also an example of philosophers who claim to base their account of human rights as apolitical moral dignity on a long-standing human rights tradition, what Griffin refers to as the “Enlightenment idea”. We will see that if there is an Enlightenment idea of human rights it challenges rather than confirms the apolitical moral dignity conception that, arguably, is “ours”. The point to emphasize is the centrality to 18th century natural rights discourses of the fact of power: that some are able to put others at risk and impose their will upon them. The centrality of this fact might be lost on us, unless we strive to remember that the doctrine of natural rights or the rights of man in the eighteenth century was invoked to a large extent by republicans. Richard Price’s “sacred” right to “resist power when abused”, for example, is not an extension of a prior and thin moral concept of rights, but part of what rights mean. Similarly, for Thomas Paine civil and political rights are not contingent examples of the extension of natural rights; natural rights and civil rights are a conceptual package. Mary Wollstonecraft goes further by insisting that levelling of holdings and control over property is conceptually required by the natural right to liberty. Rights as entitlements and moral powers conceptually presuppose a personal independence that is only possible in political circumstances where no one is the master of another, however benevolent or sound of judgement. The liberty that is the natural right of man makes no sense outside of political society. If ‘our’ concept of human rights is politically prior ethical demands of each against all and if it is conceptually unconnected to the structure and organization of political life (as Griffin claims), then our concept is not theirs. All the worse for our concept.