Enlightenment Rights Talk

Despite the prominent place usually accorded the Enlightenment in histories of modem thought, scholars have had curiously little to say about the development of rights talk during the eighteenth century. There are, to be sure, exceptions to this general rule: the contributions to natural right theory of some Scottish, German, and Swiss philosophers have been well documented. But these authors were largely writing in the tradition of theft more illustrious seventeenth-century predecessors, whose works have by far attracted the bulk of scholarly comment. Accordingly, in political accounts of how rights evolved, many historians simply fast-forward from the late seventeenth century to the American and French revolutions. When Enlightenment authors do feature in these accounts, they are usually reduced to mouthpieces for the supposedly more innovative theorists that preceded them. That these authors might have inflected, or even transformed, the discourse of rights that they inherited and then passed on to the revolutionary generations that followed is rarely considered. Here, Edelstein discusses the French Enlightenment rights talk.