Human Rights

The spread of rights language in political discourse was countered at the dawn of the nineteenth century by criticisms of the intellectual foundations of rights theory. Most famously, the major exponent of the utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), denounced the doctrine of natural rights as "simply nonsense," adding that the conjunction of natural and inalienable rights was "nonsense upon stilts." Bentham's objection was at once political and philosophical. Having witnessed the violent consequences of appeals to absolute rights during the French Revolution and its aftermath, Bentham was appalled by the abuse of rights talk in order to justify coercive restrictions and individual "leveling." While sympathetic to democratic reforms, and no friend of conservative values, Bentham believed that legality constituted the only viable means of securing human liberty. Moreover, Bentham found the metaphysics (whether religious or naturalistic) that supported eighteenth-century conceptions of human rights to be hopelessly outdated and even intellectually dangerous, inasmuch as such doctrines could be as easily invoked to inhibit individual calculations of utility as to realize them.

From a very different perspective, social conservatives also strongly condemned the idea of rights. Most famously, Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) pointed out the political terror implicit in the invocation of metaphysically abstract human rights as the foundation of social and political order. Such rights could readily be employed to ruthlessly suppress existing institutions (the church, class status, governmental units) that constituted the sources of human identity and solidarity, which Burke took to be the real or concrete basis of human rights. As bearers of abstract rights, but without a context in which to exercise them, Burke expected that the masses would turn to an authoritarian figure who would direct them. In the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), his expectations were accurately realized.

On the political left, suspicion of human rights was also rife among socialists, communists, and anarchists. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) regarded rights to be the theory, and private ownership the practice, of theft. For Karl Marx (1818–1883) and many of his followers, "rights" were necessarily "bourgeois rights," that is, an ideological superstructure that bolstered and justified the appropriation of the surplus labor of the proletariat by the economically dominant capitalist class. In Marx's view, the rights posited in capitalist society—economic rights to property ownership and to sell one's labor as well as minimal political rights—are partial and cannot be historically distinguished from the interests of capital. By starting with an abstract and unhistorical concept, appeals to human rights thus necessarily covered over and legitimized the base structures of human domination.