Doctrine Of Natural Rights Research Articles

Hobbes and the Doctrine of Natural Rights: The Place of Consent in His Political Philosophy

Hobbes and the Doctrine of Natural Rights: The Place of Consent in His Political Philosophy

Hobbes and the Doctrine of Natural Rights: the Place of Consent in His Political Philosophy

Hobbes and the Doctrine of Natural Rights: the Place of Consent in His Political Philosophy

Dewey's Attempt To Provide a Metaphysical Foundation for Democracy

HE HISTORY of political thought is replete with works that are unabashedly polemical and even sheerly propagandistic. Less frequently, political writings support major propositions with empirical evidence, at times stopping at the limits of such empirical evidence and other times going beyond the conclusions called for by such evidence. On occasion, political thought takes cognizance of information and assumptions current in fields other than politics, and imports this knowledge, sometimes candidly and sometimes surreptitiously, for use in its own area. Sometimes political thought is characterized by an attempt to ground its major propositions about the nature of politics, the governmental structure, the relationship of man to government, and the chief political values, on a psychology of man or a view of historic processes or even on a metaphysics or theory of reality. American political thought has not escaped this history. And it too has been deeply involved in various philosophic assumptions. Indicative of such an involvement was the Lockean-Jeffersonian synthesis which dominated American democratic political thought at least through the nineteenth century. There were those like John Adams, Calhoun, and Social Darwinists like Sumner who for various reasons questioned the doctrine of natural rights, the social contract and majority rule, but, by and large, the political consensus remained democratic and the assumptions underlying this consensus remained those of Locke and Jefferson. Even Bellamy in his tract Looking Backward justified a communist view by stating that since God made all men equal, their equal humanity must be recognized by equal wages. However, there were intellectual forces at work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which slowly eroded if not the democratic political faith, then at least the philosophic assumptions on which that faith rested. One primary intellectual force was the scientific outlook which rapidly precipitated into an ethic influencing the way men approached problems in areas outside the physical sciences. The scientific methodology, originally a generalized description of procedures common to the physical sciences, became, for many at least, the key to the structure of the real world and the only methodology appropriate to the solution of all real, solvable problems. Out of this intellectual milieu came several challenges to the natural rights theory as an adequate rationale for democratic political thought. One alternative to the traditional natural rights theory was formulated by John Dewey in an attempt to provide for American democratic political thought a foundation more in keeping with what he believed science had disclosed concerning the nature of reality and the appropriate methodology for inquiry into this reality.'

Thomas Hobbes and the Modern Theory of Natural Law

Thomas Hobbes and the Modern Theory of Natural Law FREDERICK A. OLAFSON IT IS WIDELYAGREEDthat in the course of the seventeenth century there took place an extensive re-casting of some of the most fundamental assumptions with respect to the nature of law that had come down from classical antiquity and had been incorporated into the principal philosophies of law of the High Middle Ages. What is not always so clearly understood is the fact that this change was effected as an internal transformation of the theory of natural law and that the writers whose names are most closely associated with this change---Grotius, Pufendorf, and others--were merely the most illustrious representatives of a flourishing school of natural law jurisprudence that dominated political and legal thought in Western Europe down to the end of the eighteenth century. Some commentators have suggested the special character of this modern theory of natural law by describing it as essentially a doctrine of natural rights. Others have argued that the crucial innovation that inspired that theory was a shift from a substantive to a formal interpretation of the norms on which the positive law depends for its moral validity. Such characterizations undoubtedly contain much that is both true and important and yet it must be admitted that they do not by themselves afford much insight into the properly philosophical motives that led to the change they summarize. Too often the explanations offered are more sociological or political than philosophical and relate the distinctive features of modern natural law theory to the preoccupations of some special interest group that needed a theory of law tailored to its own aspirations . This is unfortunate to the extent that it blocks an understanding of the genuine and unavoidable theoretical issues which the older, medieval theory of natural law posed for its continuators in the early modern period as well as of the reasoning by which the latter were led to re-formulate that theory in their own distinctive way. In this paper I propose to reconstruct some of the considerations that led to the reinterpretation of natural law as a set of formal or procedural directives and for this purpose I propose to use as my guide the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This choice may occasion some surprise. There is a long tradition that attributes to Hobbes the view--also imputed, rightly or wrongly, to Machiavelli before him and later to the legal positivists from Austin onward--that the state and its laws are subject to no moral controls at all; and if this imputation were well-founded, then ttobbes would indeed have to be classified with those writers [15] 16 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY who, by denying the reality of any higher moral law to which the sovereign authority is responsible, reject the fundamental premise of all natural law theory. Largely as a result of the remarkable study of Hobbes's political philosophy by Professor Howard Warrender, however, we are in a position to see just how inadequate and often flatly mistaken this version of Hobbes's achievement really is.1 It becomes apparent that the extraordinary power and permanent interest of Hobbes's theory are due, not to the simple absence of any theory of moral, as distinct from legal, obligation but to the way Hobbes transformed the notion of a higher law and the obligation it imposes so as to avoid the difficulties attendant upon this notion in its earlier forms. What emerges from this re-appraisal of ttobbes's thought is a figure with strong affiliations to the natural law tradition which he subjects to searching criticisms and equally profound revisions. If Professor Warrender's account places primary emphasis on the elements of continuity with the older tradition he has also clearly revealed the general nature of the innovation through which Hobbes set his stamp on so much subsequent political thought in the modern period. There is no single figure that illustrates as clearly as the Hobbes Professor Warrender has taught us to understand both the transformation of the older tradition of natural law and the initiation of a new one. What this paper undertakes to provide is simply a fuller statement of...

The Religious View of the Doctrine of Natural Rights

The Religious View of the Doctrine of Natural Rights

The Antithesis of Nature and Art, and Rousseau's Rejection of the Theory of Natural Rights

In spite of all that has been written about Rousseau's political theory, he is still generally regarded as a proponent of the theory of natural rights. His political writings are thought to contain an exposition of that theory, and they are believed to have been highly influential in spreading it. Thus Professor Crane Brinton, writing in the Encyclopædia of the Social Sciences, says that although Rousseau added little to the actual dogmas of the theory of natural rights, “he did much to give it proselyting strength” and he “gave the doctrine of natural rights, hitherto endowed with the solid and effective but imaginatively limited prestige of nature as reality, as uniformity, and as the “golden mean,” the additional prestige of nature as mystic strength, as magna mater.” But it has already been shown that Rousseau's political doctrine was neither wellknown nor influential in France until the doctrine of natural rights lost its vogue and the authoritarian doctrines of Robespierre and the extremists of 1793 superseded it.

The Influence of the Law of Nature Upon International Law in the United States

The political philosophers of the eighteenth century might have been surprised if told that their favorite doctrine of natural rights was the intellectual successor of certain theories of the Roman law and of the scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Yet the “ state of nature,” which filled so large a place in the discussion of natural rights, has been called “ an exaggerated perversion of what, in traditional system, was quite a subordinant point” From Locke to Hooker, and back through the scholastic philosophy, the germ of natural rights has been traced to the jus naturœ and the jus gentium of the Roman law. Grotius and his successors preserved the tradition in another and more direct line. The continuity of Grotius with the doctrine of the Roman law was complete. “ The law of nature,” said Holland, “ is the foundation, or rather the scaffolding, upon which the modern science of International Law was built up by Gentilis and Grotius. The change in the meaning of jus gentium made by Grotius and his successors, and the influence which the jus naturœ had in forming the new conception of the law of nations can only be referred to here.