Human Rights vs. Natural Rights

The modern conception of rights can be traced back to Enlightenment political philosophy and the movement, primarily in England, France, and the United States, to establish limited forms of representative government that would respect the freedom of individual citizens.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government (1690), described a “state of nature” prior to the creation of society in which individuals fended for themselves and looked after their own interests. In this state, each person possessed a set of natural rights, including the rights to life, liberty and property. According to Locke, when individuals came together in social groups, the main purpose of their union was to secure these rights more effectively. Consequently, they ceded to the governments they established “only the right to enforce these natural rights and not the rights themselves.”¹

Locke’s philosophy, known as classical liberalism, helped foster a new way of thinking about individuals, governments, and the rights that link the two. Previously, heads of state claimed to rule by divine right, tracing their authority through genealogy to the ultimate source to some divine being. This was as true for Roman emperors as it was Chinese and Japanese emperors. The theory of divine right was most forcefully asserted during the Renaissance by monarchs across Europe, most notoriously James I of England (1566-1625) and Louis XIV of France (1638-1715).

Locke’s principles were adopted by the founding fathers of the United States in the Declaration of Independence (1776), which stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…²

The echoes of Locke are unmistakable in the language of the Declaration of Independence. Similarly, the language used both by Locke and by the Founding Fathers clearly foreshadows the creation of a document like the Universal Declaration. These principles were further expounded and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution (1787) and Bill of Rights (1789).

The English attained their own Bill of Rights following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, just as the French did with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that was drafted after the French Revolution in 1789. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen famously reformulated Locke’s three fundamental freedoms—life, liberty and property—as liberty, equality and fraternity. The differences between the Anglo-American and continental legal, political and social traditions may be neatly summed up by this seemingly minor difference in language (see section on “Three Generations of Rights”).

The doctrine of natural rights, which deals with civil and political rights exclusively, established the rights of citizenry in a nationalized context. The innovation of human rights in the twentieth century extended the idea of individual rights to include all human beings, regardless of citizenship or state affiliation. Human rights helped reconstitute individual identity and freedom as something transcending national borders. As the atrocities of the World Wars made clear, there were times when the state became the citizen’s greatest enemy and outside protection was his or her best and only hope.