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Revolution and Counter-Revolution 1789–1793

Anne Stott

in Hannah More: The First Victorian

Hannah More's career as a conduct-book writer continued with her Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791). In the early part of 1791, her writing career was disrupted by the elopement ... More

Hannah More's career as a conduct-book writer continued with her Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791). In the early part of 1791, her writing career was disrupted by the elopement from the Park Street school of the Jamaican heiress, Clementina Clerke with Richard Vining Perry. The case became a cause célèbre. As a friend of Edmund Burke, Hannah More approved of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and she became one of the most successful loyalist writers of the 1790s. At the end of 1792, she published anonymously her Village Politics, a landmark in the literature of popular loyalism, in response to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, in which she put Burke's conservative arguments into the mouths of common people. In 1793, she wrote Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont in order to raise funds for the émigré French clergy.Less

“The Rights of Man Were but Imperfectly Understood at the Revolution”: The Architecture of Rights of Man

Peter de Bolla

in The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights

This chapter explores how Tom Paine’s Rights of Man put into circulation a phrase ‘the rights of man’. It argues that this phrase is related but not identical to the concept ‘rights of man’ that was ... More

This chapter explores how Tom Paine’s Rights of Man put into circulation a phrase ‘the rights of man’. It argues that this phrase is related but not identical to the concept ‘rights of man’ that was developed in the colonies before the American war of Independence. It demonstrates how a conceptual form works in the world and also how during the 1790’s in Britain it was also effectively neutered.Less

“… the Fundamental Rights and Liberties of Mankind …”: The Architecture of the Rights of Mankind

Peter de Bolla

in The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights

This chapter presents a data dependent account of the formation of eighteenth century accounts of the rights of man. It makes a distinction between right and rights and demonstrates the difference in ... More

This chapter presents a data dependent account of the formation of eighteenth century accounts of the rights of man. It makes a distinction between right and rights and demonstrates the difference in architecture between these two concepts. The emergence of a third concept, ‘rights of man’ is also tracked through the analysis of word searches in Eighteenth Century Collections On Line.Less

The Violence of Dispossession: Extra-Territoriality and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

Matthew Craven

in Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in Action

This chapter explores the issue of extra-territoriality and its relations to economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights). The discussion of extra-territoriality and ESC rights is placed in the ... More

This chapter explores the issue of extra-territoriality and its relations to economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights). The discussion of extra-territoriality and ESC rights is placed in the context of the Arendt's critique of the ‘Rights of Man’ as developed in the work of Agamben and Balibar. It argues that Arendt's warning that the advancement of human rights might justify processes of exclusion and dispossession at precisely the same moment at which it opposes them, retains considerable force for the contemporary ESC rights project, particularly when the latter is framed in territorial terms.Less

“There Are, Thank God, Natural, Inherent and Inseparable Rights as Men …”: The Architecture of American Rights

Peter de Bolla

in The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights

This chapter traces the history of debate in the colonies during the mid eighteenth century and leading up to the First Continental Congress around the issue of rights. It demonstrates how a new ... More

This chapter traces the history of debate in the colonies during the mid eighteenth century and leading up to the First Continental Congress around the issue of rights. It demonstrates how a new concept, ‘rights of man’ came to have currency in the colonies at this time. This concept helped the colonists explain and understand how they could propose and eventuate a separation from the mother country.Less

Perplexities of Human Rights

Ayten Gündoğdu

in Rightlessness in an Age of Rights

The chapter examines the distinctive contours of Arendt’s critique of human rights and centers on her analysis of “the perplexities of the Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s ... More

The chapter examines the distinctive contours of Arendt’s critique of human rights and centers on her analysis of “the perplexities of the Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s analysis highlights the need to rethink human rights in the light of challenging problems of rightlessness such as those posed by the twentieth-century crisis of statelessness. What distinguishes Arendt’s critique from that of various others (including those offered by Bentham, Burke, Marx, and recently, Agamben) is its aporetic approach attentive to the equivocal and contingent trajectories of human rights. To understand Arendt’s aporetic inquiry of human rights, the chapter turns to her reflections on Socrates, especially in The Life of the Mind. The analysis in this chapter responds to Jacques Rancière’s argument that Arendt’s critique renders human rights tautological or void. Contra what Rancière argues, Arendt’s aporetic approach allows her to interweave a radical critique of human rights with a call for radical rethinking in terms of a right to have rights.Less

From Nature to Nation: French Revolutionary Rights

Dan Edelstein

in On the Spirit of Rights

When the French themselves began drafting their own Declaration, they clearly had American models in mind: two-thirds of the final French articles have antecedents in American texts. But this family ... More

When the French themselves began drafting their own Declaration, they clearly had American models in mind: two-thirds of the final French articles have antecedents in American texts. But this family resemblance is also misleading. The French did not have the same judicial tradition to draw on. Instead, they adhered to the continental natural law tradition and sought the perfection of civil law on the basis of natural law. Rights, in this perspective, did not always trump laws. Critics who fault the 1789 Declaration for succumbing to légicentrisme are thus misguided. The French concern with la loi is not a legacy of Louisquatorzian centralization, but rather of a venerable, pan-European discipline of natural law. But the French did have their own constitutional legacy, which would come into conflict with this doctrine of social naturalism. Absent from the Declaration itself, the demand for protections of national rights would come to dominate political discourse after 1789. As France lurched from crisis to crisis, these collective rights came to be seen as more critical than individual ones. Those who violated these rights became the worst kind of enemy: l’ennemi du peuple, who would be the target of violent legislation during the Terror.Less

Declaring Rights: Bentham and the Rights of Man

David Lieberman

in Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law: Essays in Honour of Knud Haakonssen

Critics who were sceptical of the particular fusion of law and history in natural jurisprudence launched their assaults in the later eighteenth-century from within established religious ... More

Critics who were sceptical of the particular fusion of law and history in natural jurisprudence launched their assaults in the later eighteenth-century from within established religious denominations, or asserted the view that the anticipated reforms would fail, being insufficiently grounded on an accurate portrayal of human nature. The latter approach has been especially associated with Jeremy Bentham, who for many scholars has become the most prominent opponent of rights-based theories. This chapter reconsiders this view, charting Bentham’s view of natural rights from his earliest writings to the summary Constitutional codes developed for post-Napoleonic Europe. The Bentham who emerges, rather than being a consistent enemy of the kinds of declarations of rights that marked the American and French Revolutions, was instead building upon much of the jurisprudence he condemned in his rhetoric. The chapter revises the commonplace view of Bentham and his intellectual origins in consequence.Less

Are there Natural Rights? The Sceptical Critique and Rights after 1776

Nigel Biggar

in What's Wrong with Rights?

This chapter moves to extend the testing of the Sceptical Tradition’s objections to natural rights from the pre-modern or early modern periods to classic modern affirmations. It begins with the ... More

This chapter moves to extend the testing of the Sceptical Tradition’s objections to natural rights from the pre-modern or early modern periods to classic modern affirmations. It begins with the American and French declarations of the late eighteenth century, before proceeding to two famous treatises of the same period, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and then ending with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants of the mid-twentieth century. The chapter concludes that its scrutiny of modern affirmations has found ample evidence to substantiate many of the sceptics’ charges: some of the rights asserted are truistic or merely aspirational; others are ludicrously or dangerously abstract, licensing unrealistic hopes and political recklessness; yet others conflate conditional positive rights justified by natural morality with natural rights, misleadingly endowing the former with the universality and inviolability of the latter. Further, David Ritchie’s claim has been substantiated: the content of certain rights cannot be determined by a sheer appeal to ‘nature’, and apart from consideration of the common good in the relevant circumstances. On the other hand, the critical survey of modern natural rights-talk also shows that it can acknowledge the insufficiency of rights for overall political well-being, talk of duties too, and recognise the need for virtue and a cultural matrix that generates it.Less

Conclusion

M. Anne Brown

in Human Rights and the Borders of Suffering: The Promotion of Human Rights in International Politics

This book has explored the promotion of human rights practices and approaches in international life. It has argued for a shift in approach—a greater preparedness to reflect on some of the categories ... More

This book has explored the promotion of human rights practices and approaches in international life. It has argued for a shift in approach—a greater preparedness to reflect on some of the categories by which we construct our sense of human rights and some acknowledgment of the limits of our understanding, or even of our ignorance, of the complex life to which these categories, particularly that of the human, refer. This way of conceptualising human rights has provided a remarkably powerful framework for the characterisation of both the individual and political community and for the identification of abuse. Moreover, it has to a significant extent shaped the terms in which general debate over human rights in international politics has been repeatedly cast, particularly the polarity of universalism and relativism, of the ‘rights of man’ and the citizen's rights, and of political and economic (or social or cultural) rights. Human rights practices are not part of a progression to perfection, or its approximation, but a way of working with the systemic generation of suffering.Less

Whig Principles And Jacobin Dogma, 1791–1793

Richard Bourke

in Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke

This chapter details Burke's political life from 1791 to 1793. After 1790, Burke's career was shaped by the reaction to the Reflections. The work was a sophisticated polemical assault on attempts to ... More

This chapter details Burke's political life from 1791 to 1793. After 1790, Burke's career was shaped by the reaction to the Reflections. The work was a sophisticated polemical assault on attempts to reduce the rights and responsibilities of citizenship to a perilous ideal of self-government. However, it was widely construed as an attack on the equality of human beings and the accountability of governments to the people whom they ruled. In fact, it was a critique of the resort to primitive equality as a justification for destroying equitable relations in civil society. At the same time, its aim was to distinguish responsible government from popular tyranny. From Burke's vantage, the doctrine of the rights of man represented a crusade against the values of cohesion and responsibility, and was therefore liable to shatter society and government altogether. However, the force of his argument was drowned out by subsequent political rhetoric.Less

Human Rights as Politics and Anti-Politics

Ayten Gündoğdu

in Rightlessness in an Age of Rights

The chapter engages with Arendt’s notorious concept of “the social” in response to the claim that her critique of the Rights of Man results from her distaste for the politicization of social issues ... More

The chapter engages with Arendt’s notorious concept of “the social” in response to the claim that her critique of the Rights of Man results from her distaste for the politicization of social issues (e.g., Jacques Rancière). Partially agreeing with this claim, this chapter suggests that understanding contemporary struggles of migrants demands rethinking and revising Arendt’s arguments. The multiple and conflicting uses of “the social” in her works, as can be seen in her divergent assessments of Karl Marx and the French Revolution, offer novel interpretive possibilities in this regard. The chapter points to these possibilities by providing an unconventional reading of Arendt’s critique of the Jacobin approach to poverty in On Revolution. It mobilizes this reading to think critically about the anti-political trajectories that human rights can take and points to some worrisome contemporary trends: the rise of a compassionate humanitarianism centered on suffering, the tendency to treat challenging human rights problems as matters of humanitarian administration, and the rise of a military humanitarianism. The chapter finally turns to Arendt’s account of the labor movement in The Human Condition and concludes that an Arendtian politics of human rights centers on the democratic agency of subjects whose rights are at stake.Less

The Futures of Human Rights

Peter de Bolla

in The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights

The final chapter addresses the vexed issue of contemporary international human rights. It uses the preceding account of the history of formation of the concept ‘rights of man’ to illumine current ... More

The final chapter addresses the vexed issue of contemporary international human rights. It uses the preceding account of the history of formation of the concept ‘rights of man’ to illumine current debates in the theory of universal human rights. It suggests that a concept of universal human rights must be structured through aspiration and outlines the consequences of this observation.Less

An Education in Contempt: Ridicule in Wollstonecraft’s Politics

Ross Carroll

in Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain

This chapter discusses the role of ridicule in the work of one of the century's foremost critics of men and women's subordination. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft, ... More

This chapter discusses the role of ridicule in the work of one of the century's foremost critics of men and women's subordination. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft, referencing Shaftesbury, accused Edmund Burke of using ridicule to humiliate his political opponents, including her own mentor, Richard Price. Yet she herself showed few qualms about returning like with like. Rather than demonstrating inconsistency, the chapter argues, Wollstonecraft's rhetorical strategy reveals her appreciation for the power of ridicule to expose prejudice and undercut illegitimate claims to authority. Particularly in her two Vindications, Wollstonecraft deployed ridicule as a weapon against haughty elites and made a case for teaching young women to laugh contemptuously at the cultural products (mainly sentimental novels) that contributed to their subordination.Less

The State of Law: Civil Society

Jean-François Kervégan

in The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit

The argument given in this chapter is that Hegel's theory of the "civil society" contains an implicit definition of what one shall names later "Rechtstaat" or "State of law" (or even "rule of law") ... More

The argument given in this chapter is that Hegel's theory of the "civil society" contains an implicit definition of what one shall names later "Rechtstaat" or "State of law" (or even "rule of law") and provides a foundation for a critique of its limits.Less

Does Nature Confer Rights?

Susan Marks

in A False Tree of Liberty: Human Rights in Radical Thought

This chapter takes Hannah Arendt’s engagement with Edmund Burke in Origins of Totalitarianism as a starting-point for considering the interrelation in the Revolution controversy of nature, history, ... More

This chapter takes Hannah Arendt’s engagement with Edmund Burke in Origins of Totalitarianism as a starting-point for considering the interrelation in the Revolution controversy of nature, history, and rights. Evidence is presented of a mode of argumentation that is (by today’s standards) eclectic and historicising. Thus, the rights of man were at once natural and historical, and while Thomas Paine asserted the novelty of their study, Thomas Spence framed his exposition of the ‘real rights of man’ with reference to an older tradition that links him to the people and events touched on in earlier chapters of this book.Less

The French Revolution Controversy

Susan Marks

in A False Tree of Liberty: Human Rights in Radical Thought

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth ... More

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.Less

Liberty with All Its Risks

in Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1898-1945

The Ligue des droits de l'homme (League of the Rights of Man) leaned towards the Left for its commitment to civil liberties, which was evident in the Dreyfus affair that brought the League to its ... More

The Ligue des droits de l'homme (League of the Rights of Man) leaned towards the Left for its commitment to civil liberties, which was evident in the Dreyfus affair that brought the League to its existence. In reality, the League realized that it was difficult to reconcile its stand on civil liberties with its more general political goals. Based on its doctrine, politics should give way to principles. Throughout its existence, however, the League also had to deal with conflicts between the policies that must be dictated by liberal and civil libertarian theory and the more immediate political consequences of such policies. The League's dilemma in trying to balance its simultaneous commitment to civil liberties and left-wing politics was illustrated by the debates in France over freedom of the press, women's suffrage, and freedom of association for religious congregations.Less