A Timeline of Human Rights
(Under Construction)
1790
Edmund Burke decries the French Revolution and argues against natural rights
Burke blasted the French Revolution and stirred a debate over natural rights. The most famous and influential reactions were Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Man
Burke was a supporter of American independence, a critic of the notion that kings led by divine right, and a believer in the idea that people had the right to overthrow an oppressive monarchy.
His Reflections on the Revolution in France, then, came as a surprise to liberals, including Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who imagined him on their side.
But while Burke could support republicanism up to a point, he drew the line at what he saw as the excesses of the French Revolution. In particular, he was critical of the idea that rights could exist outside of any system of government or law.
Without a means to guarantee them, rights did not exist:
What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics1.
Such arguments would be repeated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
1 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, paragraph 96.