Inalienable Rights and Positive Government in the Modern World

The idea that all men by nature have “rights” is the philosophic moral basis of modernity. The first great moderns who developed a theory of “rights,” and used it to establish the moral basis of their politics, were Hobbes and Locke. When pre-Hobbesian thinkers spoke of “rights,” they conceived of them as a function of legal or social status. Hobbes is the first major thinker to assert, and elaborate the consequences of asserting, that rights belong to human beings as such rather than to a particular individual by virtue of his position. What makes Hobbes important in this respect is that he first changed “rights” from the basis of the subjects' duties to the sovereign into the moral basis of civil society as such. Hence, Hobbes was the first important thinker to transform “rights” from a legal or social idea into a philosophic idea.