Natural Rights in the Thirteenth Century: A Quaestio of Henry of Ghent

Abstract

According to one recent account, in the preliberal epoch before the seventeenth century people did not think of individuals possessing inalienable rights to anything much less life, liberty, property, or even the pursuit of happiness.' The statement is not true, but it is excusable. Compared with the flood of writing on the classical rights theories of the early modern period,2 there has been only a thin trickle of work on medieval ideas concerning individual natural rights, or human rights as we say nowadays, rights inhering in the human person as such.3 Some modern authors see the seventeenth-century rights theories as a radical departure from ancient and medieval ways of thought;4 they are content to explain the ideas of Hobbes and Locke and Pufendorf by reference to some aspect of the intellectual, political, or economic life of the seventeenth century itself. C. B. MacPherson, for instance, emphasizing economic factors, inaugurated a minor academic industry when he interpreted Locke's teaching that everyone had a property right in his own person as a reflection of the possessive individualism of earlymodern capitalism.5 Other scholars, more discerningly, realize that we cannot adequately understand seventeenth-century writers without investigating the whole tradition of discourse that they inherited, a tradition that stretches back to the medieval epoch. But even these scholars have considered only a very limited range of medieval source material. They usually follow one of two strategies. Some see the modern doctrine of natural rights as a licit development of the medieval natural-law tradition classically formulated by Aquinas. This was