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Nature or Nation?

The century that was capped off by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen showed little indication, during its first fifty years, that it would come to care so much about natural rights, or believe that the purpose of society was to conserve “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.” So how did this particular rights regime come to hold such sway? As the author shows in this essay, the Enlightenment did not invent the idea of inalienable rights, which had already been forcefully expressed as far back as the sixteenth century. But a century of absolutist politics had silenced this discourse, despite its flourishing across the Channel. Its rediscovery, in the eighteenth century, does not appear to have been triggered by cross-cultural currents, or the rereading of older documents. Rather, it is argued that it was thanks to the Physiocrats that inalienable natural rights became once again a cornerstone of political discourse.