The Decline of Natural Right
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In a preface he wrote in October 1894 to his book Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Political and Ethical Conceptions, David G. Ritchie (sometime professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews) made the following observation: “When I began, some three years ago, to write a paper on ‘Natural Rights,’ . . . I had a certain fear that in criticizing that famous theory I might be occupied in slaying the already slain. Recent experience has, however, convinced me that the theory is still, in a sense, alive, or at least capable of mischief. Though disclaimed by almost all our more careful writers on politics and ethics, it yet remains a commonplace of the newspaper and the platform, not only in the United States of America, where the theory may be said to form part of the national creed, but in this country, where it was assailed a century ago by both Burke and Bentham.” Is Ritchie correct in his claim that the theory of natural right never really died in the nineteenth century? It certainly suffered grievous injury at the end of the eighteenth century at the hands of thinkers like Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. But how telling were their blows? In this chapter I shall consider what happened to the theory in the century following the attacks by Burke and Bentham. Both of those critics—the traditional conservative and the utilitarian radical—were responding to natural right as it figured in the ideology of the French Revolution. In 1789 Edmund Burke wanted the world to know that “Englishmen at least are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire. . . . Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. . . . In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails. . . . We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. . . . We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility.” Jeremy Bentham, writing a few years later, concentrated his ire on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In his notorious condemnation of natural and imprescriptible rights as “nonsense upon stilts,” he observed that the force of any argument of natural right “is in proportion to the strength of lungs in those who use it. . . . I mean in the first instance: for ultimately it depends upon the sharpness of the daggers which he . . . has in his pocket.” t was the language of political violence. “When I hear of natural rights . . . I always see in the background a cluster of daggers or of pikes introduced in the National Assembly with the applause of the President Condorcet for the avowed purpose of exterminating the King’s friends. Of late these pikes and these daggers have been exhibited in broad day, and pointed out to reasonable and reasoning men, as gibbets used to be to murderers and thieves.” So was it events, rather than critique, that discredited natural right? One of the things I want to do in this chapter is to consider how far the decline of natural right in the nineteenth century can be attributed to the reaction against the revolution in France, and how far it was the effect of independent streams of thought, such as positivism and historicism. I shall ask why radical thought was ambivalent about the doctrine throughout the century, and why socialist thought in particular was mostly inclined to turn its back on it. As a framework for thought, natural right suffered a radical decline in the social and political sciences. But matters were not so clear in jurisprudence, and natural right lived on to a much riper old age in the writings of some prominent economists. So we have to ask, What is it about this theory that allowed it to survive in these environments, when so much of the rest of intellectual endeavor in the nineteenth century was toxic or inhospitable to it? Finally, with Professor Ritchie, we shall ask how far American thought represents an exception to all of this, and the extent to which and the reasons for which the doctrine survived as a way of thinking in the United States, long after it had lost its credibility in political thinking elsewhere.
Source Publication
The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790-1870)
Source Editors/Authors
Allen W. Wood, Songsuk Susan Hahn
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Waldron, Jeremy, "The Decline of Natural Right" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 1570.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1570
