Abstract
Some decades stand out as historical crucibles where ideas are forged, ferociously contested, and emerge over time as a paradigm, an orthodoxy. The struggle for and against such an idea can be observed in all aspects of philosophy, politics and culture. The 1790s in England were such a decade. Natural rights, evolving from natural law and later to become human rights, was just such an idea, and literature was one powerful forge where the idea was tested through the creative imagination and transferred to popular consciousness. Among the results were new and more egalitarian ways of thinking about society, far-reaching political reforms, and the birth of new forms of literature and the movement we call romanticism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a useful overview, see Human Rights, eds, J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York and London: New York University Press, 1981), esp. Pennock, ‘Rights, Natural Rights, and Human Rights — A General View’.
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 198.
Lloyd L. Weinreb, ‘Natural Law and Rights’, in Natural Law Theory, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 278–305, 280.
Peter Jones, Rights (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
See, for example, Leo Strauss, Natural Rights and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
See, for example, Poisoning the Minds o f the Lower Orders by Don Herzog (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) and John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Brendon Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History o f Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 106. I have silently reversed the order of clauses, to suit my own sequence.
Eighteenth-century untilitarianism meets unexpected agreement with Freudian psychiatry on the issue of a primal human motivation lying in self-interest and envy: see for example, John Forrester, ‘Psychoanalysis and the History of the Passions: The Strange Destiny of Envy’, in John O’Neill (ed.), Freud and the Passions (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 127–50.
Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 177. Bate’s book shows, however, how criticism and cartoons could politicise plays themselves and appropriate them for radical and populist causes.
Edward Royle and James Walvin in English Radicals and Reformers: 1760–1848 (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1982).
Paul O’Flinn, ’ “Beware of reverence”: writing and radicalism in the 1790s’, in Writing and Radicalism, ed. John Lucas (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 84–101.
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, General Editor Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2–3.
See Gale MacLachlan and Ian Reid, Framing and Interpretation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994) for a systematic summary of ‘framing’ theory.
See R. S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen, A Culture o f Rights: The Bill o f Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law — 1791 and 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28.
See Pina Ford, ‘Natural Law Context in Thomas More’s “Utopia” ’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2001).
Quoted by William G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981), 33.
Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, transl. Daniela Gobetti (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993; first publ. In Italian, 1989), 70.
Page references in the text are to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968).
See, for example, R. E. Ewin, Virtues and Rights: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), passim, which provides different interpretations of Hobbes’s version of natural law.
See Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 51–7.
The phrase is from Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 11–12.
Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Tuck speaks of a movement from passive rights (to have the right to be given or allowed something by someone else) to active rights (to have the right to do something oneself), but this does not seem very relevant to our period. See also Mclnerny who notes that ‘in the classical sense the right was an external relation to be established between persons on the basis of things’, so that the jus is the object of justice. However, ‘in the modern sense, right has become subjective, it attaches to the individual taken singly as an instantiation of human nature and amounts to a claim that he can make on the state or on others.’ ‘Natural Law and Natural Rights’, in Aquinas on Human Action (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 213–14.
Dr Bemetzrieder, A New Code for Gentlemen; in which are Considered God and Man; Man’s Natural Rights and Social Duties …; (London: J. Barfield, 1803).
Linda Kirk in Richard Cumberland and Natural Law: Secularisation of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). I feel justified in using Kirk’s paraphrases and quotations from Cumberland, since the original was in Latin. In dealing with such background figures as Cumberland, my book concentrates on ideas rather than niceties of translation.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Centwy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Ann Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-century Sensibility and the Novel o f the Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Quoted in Peter Laslett’s edition of Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 109. I acknowledge that my views are broadly based on Laslett’s in his detailed Introduction, and that I use his edition.
For a thorough discussion of this contradiction, see Wayne Glausser, Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1998), ch. 4, ‘Slavery’, 63–91.
Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Centwy Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 105–19.
For the key documents, see especially Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England, ed. David Wootton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986).
Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 12–13.
Ibid., 13.
D. D. Raphael, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’, Enlightenment, Rights and Revolution: Essays in Legal and Social Philosophy (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989), 11. For the most recent and detailed account of the great changes undergoing England in the Commonwealth period, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
See, for example, G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The Common People: 1746–1946 (London: Methuen & Co, fourth edn, 1949), Ch. VII.
Quoted in Carl B. Cone, Torchbearer of Freedom: The Influence of Richard Price on Eighteenth Centwy Thought (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1952), 183.
A. Goodwin, ‘The political genesis of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on The Revolution in France’ (Manchester: The John Rylands Library, 1968), 355.
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991).
Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law in 14 vols, ed. A. L. Goodhart and H. G. Hanbury (London: Methuen, 1952), esp. vols XII and XIII.
Alan Harding, A Social History o f English Law (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966).
For an account of law in the early eighteenth century, which stayed in place at least until the 1790s, see Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (The New Oxford History of England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 14.
See Edmund Blunden, Keats’s Publisher (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936) and Tim Chilcott, A Publisher and His Circle, the Life and Work of John Taylor, Keats’s Publisher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
The most recent book on Johnson is by Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Before that, the standard biography was by Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979). Tyson also published an article on Johnson in the 1975 issue of Studies in Bibliography and the relevant entry in vol.1 of the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals. Claire Tomalin published a piece in the Times Literary Supplement of 2 December 1994, Leslie Chard published an article in The Library (1977) and there is also a biographical article by Carol Hall in The British Literary Book Trade 1700–1820, vol. 154 of The Dictionary o f National Biography, ed. James K. Bracken and Joel Silver (Detroit, Washington, DC and London: Gale Research Incorporated, 1995), 159–64. See also Carol Hall’s Blake and Fuseli: A Study in the Transmission of ldeas (New York and London: Garland, 1985). I am grateful to Ian Gadd of the New Dictionary of National Biography project, and Carol Hall, for leading me to these references.
Leslie Chard, ‘Joseph Johnson: Father of the Book Trade’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1975), 51–82. For another appreciation of Johnson written by Leslie Chard, see ‘Bookseller to Publisher: Joseph Johnson and the English Book Trade, 1760–1810’, Library, fifth series, 32 (1977), 138–54.
Quoted by Claire Tomalin in Mary Wollstonecraft (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 92.
Robert N. Essick, ‘William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution’, Studies in Romanticism, 30 (Summer 1991), 189–212, 201.
Copyright information
© 2005 R. S. White
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
White, R.S. (2005). From Natural Law to Natural Rights. In: Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506145_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506145_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54443-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50614-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)