[lit-ideas] Re: Right of Return (and natural rights)
- From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:19:26 -0500
Here's what the Columbia Encyclopedia [from
bartelby.com] says about natural rights
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05.
natural rights
political theory that maintains that an individual
enters into society with certain basic rights and
that no government can deny these rights. The
modern idea of natural rights grew out of the
ancient and medieval doctrines of natural law,
i.e., the belief that people, as creatures of
nature and God, should live their lives and
organize their society on the basis of rules and
precepts laid down by nature or God. With the
growth of the idea of individualism, especially in
the 17th cent., natural law doctrines were
modified to stress the fact that individuals,
because they are natural beings, have rights that
cannot be violated by anyone or by any society.
Perhaps the most famous formulation of this
doctrine is found in the writings of John Locke.
Locke assumed that humans were by nature rational
and good, and that they carried into political
society the same rights they had enjoyed in
earlier stages of society, foremost among them
being freedom of worship, the right to a voice in
their own government, and the right of property.
Jean Jacques Rousseau attempted to reconcile the
natural rights of the individual with the need for
social unity and cooperation through the idea of
the social contract.
The most important elaboration of the idea of
natural rights came in the North American
colonies, however, where the writings of Thomas
Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Paine made of
the natural rights theory a powerful justification
for revolution. The classic expressions of natural
rights are the English Bill of Rights (1689), the
American Declaration of Independence (1776), the
French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen (1789), the first 10 amendments to the
Constitution of the United States (known as the
Bill of Rights, 1791), and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations
(1948).
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