A Theory of the “Rights” Concept
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v23i1.28988Keywords:
rights, duties, entitlements, property rights, prosperity, equalityAbstract
This essay examines the evolutionary development of the “rights” concept. It argues that the concept is both relatively recent and fundamentally economic rather than abstractly philosophical. The essay is unique, not only in its explication of the concept, but also in the use of ngram data (i.e., the changing relative frequency of published words and phrases) to visualize the correspondence between the evolving rights concept and growing aggregate prosperity.
References
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Baghwati, Jagdish. 1982. Directly Unproductive, Profit-Seeking (DUP) Activities. Journal of Political Economy 90: 988–1002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/261104
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———. 1975. The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Clark, Gregory. 2007. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life. London: John Murray.
———. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
de Jasay, Anthony. 2002. Justice and Its Surroundings. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 1998. Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C.—Present. At http://holtz.org/Library/Social_Science/Economics/Estimating_World_GDP_by_DeLong/Estimating_World_GDP.htm
Drucker, Peter. 1993. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper Business.
Epstein, Richard. 1985. Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2011. Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Gilbert, W. S. 1885 [1932]. “The Mikado.” In W.S. Gilbert—Complete Operas, 345–400. London: Dorset.
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Hasnas. John. 2005. Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights. Social Philosophy and Policy 22(1): 111–147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0265052505041051
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———. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1973. Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I: Rules and Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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———. 2005. “Sunstein on Rights.” The Independent Review 10(1): 117–131.
———. 2012. “Rights: Rhetoric versus Reality.” The Independent Review 17(1): 51–64.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. 1909 [1881]. The Common Law. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.
Jones, Peter. 2008. “Group Rights.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter Edition, edited by E. Zalta. At http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/rights-group
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Knight, Frank. 1982 [1944]. “The Rights of Man and Natural Law.” In Freedom and Reform: Essays in Economics and Social Philosophy, 312–357. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
Levin, Yuval. 2014. Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books.
Locke, John. 2009 [1685]. “Four Letters on Toleration.” In The Works of John Locke, Vol. 5. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Portable Library of Liberty.
———. 1988 [1689]. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810268
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1996 [1531]. Discourses on Livy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226500331.001.0001
Madison, James. 1906 [1792]. “Property.” In The Writings of James Madison, Vol. 6. edited by G. Hunt, 101–103. New York: Putnam.
Maine, Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray.
Maritain, Jacques. 1936. Freedom in the Modern World. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Mises, Ludwig von. 1996 [1949]. Human Action, 4th ed. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education.
Montanye, James. 2012. “Morality, Altruism, and Religion in Economics Perspective.” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 20(2): 19–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/eph.v20i2.19
Nedelsky, Jennifer. 1990. Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and its Legacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Newberg, Andrew and Mark Robert Waldman. 2006. Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. New York: Free Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Oord, Thomas. Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.
Paine, Thomas. 1987 [1791 and 1792]. “The Rights of Man” (Parts 1 and 2). In The Thomas Paine Reader, edited by M. Foot and I. Kramnick, 201–364. New York: Penguin Books.
Passmore, John. 1970. The Perfectability of Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Paul, Ellen Frankel, Fred Miller, and Jeffrey Paul, eds. 2012. Natural Rights, Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pipes, Richard. 1999. Property and Freedom. New York: Vintage Books.
Pufendorf, Samuel. 2002 [1673]. The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
Reich, Charles. 1964. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73(5): 733–787. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/794645
Rowley, Charles, Robert Tollison and Gordon Tullock, eds. 1988. The Political Economy of Rent-Seeking. Boston, MA: Klewer Academic Publishers. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1963-5
Rose, David. 2011. The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199781744.001.0001
Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, edited by E. Canan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sowell, Thomas. 2009. Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books.
Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sunstein, Cass. 2004. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. New York: Basic Books.
———. 2013. Simpler: The Future of Government. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wenar, Leif. 2011. “Rights.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2011 Edition, edited by E. Zalta. At http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/rights.
West, Thomas. 2012. “Locke’s Law of Nature.” In Natural Rights, Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Thought. edited by E. F. Paul, F. Miller and J. Paul, 1–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, David Sloan. 2015. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (and Templeton Press).
Wilson, Edward. O. 2012. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright Publishing.
———. 2013. Letters to a Young Scientist. New York: Liveright Publishing.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2008. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400828715
Ackerman, Bruce. 1977. Private Property and the Constitution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1953 [1274]. Summa Theologica. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica.
Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human
Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Baghwati, Jagdish. 1982. Directly Unproductive, Profit-Seeking (DUP) Activities. Journal of Political Economy 90: 988–1002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/261104
Barzel, Yoram. 1989. Economic Analysis of Property Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bentham, Jeremy. 2009 [1798]. “Anarchical Fallacies: An Examination of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen Decreed by the Constituent Assembly in Paris.” In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. II, 898–905. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Portable Library of Liberty.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1997 [1958]. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, 191–242. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Blackstone, William. 1979 [1765]. Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Buchanan, James. 1999 [1968]. The Demand and Supply of Public Goods. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
———. 1975. The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ceaser, James. 2012. “Progressivism and the Doctrine of Natural Rights.” In Natural Rights Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy, edited by E. F. Paul, F. Miller and J. Paul, 177–195. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139237116.007
Clark, Gregory. 2007. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life. London: John Murray.
———. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
de Jasay, Anthony. 2002. Justice and Its Surroundings. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 1998. Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C.—Present. At http://holtz.org/Library/Social_Science/Economics/Estimating_World_GDP_by_DeLong/Estimating_World_GDP.htm
Drucker, Peter. 1993. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper Business.
Epstein, Richard. 1985. Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2011. Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Gilbert, W. S. 1885 [1932]. “The Mikado.” In W.S. Gilbert—Complete Operas, 345–400. London: Dorset.
Glendon, Mary Ann. 1991. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: The Free Press.
Google. 2013. Google Books Ngram Viewer. https://books.google.com/ngrams.
Greenspan, Alan. 2013. The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting. New York: The Penguin Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2013. The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, translated by Ciarin Cronin. New York: Polity Press.
Hasnas. John. 2005. Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights. Social Philosophy and Policy 22(1): 111–147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0265052505041051
Hayek, Friedrich. 1994 [1944]. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1973. Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I: Rules and Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1998 [1651]. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hocutt, Max. 2000. Grounded Ethics; The Empirical Bases of Normative Judgments. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
———. 2005. “Sunstein on Rights.” The Independent Review 10(1): 117–131.
———. 2012. “Rights: Rhetoric versus Reality.” The Independent Review 17(1): 51–64.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. 1909 [1881]. The Common Law. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.
Jones, Peter. 2008. “Group Rights.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter Edition, edited by E. Zalta. At http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/rights-group
Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Fast Thinking and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
King, William Casey. 2013. Ambition, A History From Vice to Virtue. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Knight, Frank. 1982 [1944]. “The Rights of Man and Natural Law.” In Freedom and Reform: Essays in Economics and Social Philosophy, 312–357. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
Levin, Yuval. 2014. Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books.
Locke, John. 2009 [1685]. “Four Letters on Toleration.” In The Works of John Locke, Vol. 5. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Portable Library of Liberty.
———. 1988 [1689]. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810268
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1996 [1531]. Discourses on Livy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226500331.001.0001
Madison, James. 1906 [1792]. “Property.” In The Writings of James Madison, Vol. 6. edited by G. Hunt, 101–103. New York: Putnam.
Maine, Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray.
Maritain, Jacques. 1936. Freedom in the Modern World. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Mises, Ludwig von. 1996 [1949]. Human Action, 4th ed. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education.
Montanye, James. 2012. “Morality, Altruism, and Religion in Economics Perspective.” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 20(2): 19–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/eph.v20i2.19
Nedelsky, Jennifer. 1990. Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and its Legacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Newberg, Andrew and Mark Robert Waldman. 2006. Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. New York: Free Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Oord, Thomas. Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.
Paine, Thomas. 1987 [1791 and 1792]. “The Rights of Man” (Parts 1 and 2). In The Thomas Paine Reader, edited by M. Foot and I. Kramnick, 201–364. New York: Penguin Books.
Passmore, John. 1970. The Perfectability of Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Paul, Ellen Frankel, Fred Miller, and Jeffrey Paul, eds. 2012. Natural Rights, Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pipes, Richard. 1999. Property and Freedom. New York: Vintage Books.
Pufendorf, Samuel. 2002 [1673]. The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
Reich, Charles. 1964. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73(5): 733–787. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/794645
Rowley, Charles, Robert Tollison and Gordon Tullock, eds. 1988. The Political Economy of Rent-Seeking. Boston, MA: Klewer Academic Publishers. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1963-5
Rose, David. 2011. The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199781744.001.0001
Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, edited by E. Canan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sowell, Thomas. 2009. Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books.
Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sunstein, Cass. 2004. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. New York: Basic Books.
———. 2013. Simpler: The Future of Government. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wenar, Leif. 2011. “Rights.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2011 Edition, edited by E. Zalta. At http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/rights.
West, Thomas. 2012. “Locke’s Law of Nature.” In Natural Rights, Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Thought. edited by E. F. Paul, F. Miller and J. Paul, 1–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, David Sloan. 2015. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (and Templeton Press).
Wilson, Edward. O. 2012. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright Publishing.
———. 2013. Letters to a Young Scientist. New York: Liveright Publishing.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2008. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400828715
Published
2015-11-23
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Montanye, J. (2015). A Theory of the “Rights” Concept. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 23(1), 65-91. https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v23i1.28988
