Nonsense upon Stilts (Routledge Revivals)

Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man

Jeremy Waldron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317587217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Nonsense upon Stilts¸ first published in 1987, Waldron includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Each text is prefaced by an historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes. The collection as a whole in introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the eighteenth-century idea of natural rights which they attacked.

But the point of reproducing these works is not merely historical. Modern attacks on 'rights-based' political philosophy mirror the concerns of Bentham, Burke and Marx. Jeremy Waldron has therefore added an extensive concluding essay which relates these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights and re-examines the idea of rights in the light of contemporary critiques. This text provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in politics and philosophy.

‘Nonsense upon Stilts’ Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man

Edited with introductory and concluding essays by

JEREMY WALDRON

First published in 1987 by

Methuen & Co. Ltd

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Published in the USA by

Methuen & Co.

in association with Methuen, Inc.

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1987 Jeremy Waldron

Phototypeset by AKM Associates (UK) Ltd

Ajmal House, Hayes Road, Southall, London

Printed in Great Britain by

St Edmunsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nonsense upon stilts:

Bentham, Burke and Marx

on the rights of man.

1. Civil rights—History—Sources

I. Waldron, Jeremy

323.4’09’03 JC571

ISBN 0-416-91890-5 pbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

‘Nonsense upon stilts.’

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Human rights.

2. Bentham, Jeremy, 1748–1832 ——

Contributions in human rights.

3. Burke, Edmund, 1729–1797 ——

Contributions in human rights.

4. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883 ——

Contributions in human rights.

I. Title.

JC571.N655 1987 323.4’01 87–11211

ISBN 0-416-91890-5 (pbk.)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742809

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Natural rights in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• 2 The ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ 1789
• 3 Jeremy Bentham's Anarchical Fallacies
• 4 Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
• 5 Karl Marx's ‘On the Jewish Question’
• 6 Nonsense upon Stilts? – a reply
• Bibliogarphical Essay
• Name Index
• Subject Index

Acknowledgements

Though this project took more time to put together than it should have, it would havetaken even longer had it not been for the encouragement and support of my editor atMethuen, Nancy Marten. I am grateful to her, and also to Robert Goodin, Richard Gunn,Don Herzog, Kristin Luker, Kim Scheppele and Philip Selznick for discussing variousparts of it with me. Sections of the concluding essay have been read at seminars as farafield as Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Wellington andDunedin. I am grateful to the participants for their comments.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742809-1

The idea of human rights is taken more seriously now than it has been for centuries.Not since the heady days of the American and French Revolutions have rights been usedso widely as touchstones of political evaluation or as an idiom for the expression ofpolitical demands. In the market-place of domestic politics and in internationalaffairs, respect for rights is the new criterion of political legitimacy. Agovernment that respects its citizens’ rights is a good government and deservessupport; a government that violates human rights should be denied aid and comfortfrom abroad and shunned in the international community. In moral and politicaltheory, where the idea was for a long time in disrepute, rights are again a serioussubject of philosophical enquiry. The literature abounds with discussions of theirnormative structure, the values like equality and autonomy that are thought tounderpin them, the weight that they are supposed to have against other moralconsiderations, and the relation between moral rights and the rights that areestablished by positive law. It is common for political philosophers nowadays toclaim that the demands of justice are rights-based rather than based onconsiderations of social utility, and many have adopted the Lockean view that theprimary function of law and other aspects of social organization is to constitute aframework to uphold and respect the moral rights of individual citizens.¹

But though these ideas are popular and powerful, they are far from uncontroversial.Recently more and more writers have expressed reservations about the shift away frompragmatic or utilitarian modes of political evaluation, about the fact that we nolonger ask what is in the interest of all but, in every case, what individuals areentitled to as a matter of principle. Others are alarmed at what appears to be theascendancy of an assertive and muscular individualism in this sort of theory at theexpense of what they take to be a proper awareness of community, solidarity and civicvirtue in human life. Still others are worried by what seems to them to be theabstract and formalistic character of modern claims about universal rights. Moderncharters of rights and their philosophical rationalizations are generalizations: theydo not seem to pay much attention to the difference that social and historicalcircumstances may make to the application of anodyne rights-formulas across a variety of human situations. Thesemisgivings – which, as I said, are increasingly being voiced – may be regarded as theshadow that is cast by the ascendancy of rights talk in modern politicaldiscourse.²

The utilitarian, collectivist and relativist sentiments that lie behind thesemisgivings are uncongenial to many liberals. But whether we find them initiallyappealing or not, they deserve the most careful consideration. Even from a liberalstandpoint, the worst that can happen is that we start taking rights for granted inmoral and political discussion. Few of us want the language of rights to degenerateinto a sort of lingua franca in which moral and political values of all or any kindsmay be expressed. To take rights seriously means to be aware of what is distinctiveand controversial about a claim of right, and that, I think, is inseparable from anattempt to understand what someone might be getting at when she repudiates the ideaof rights altogether.

What I am trying to do in this book is to put the modern critique of human rightsinto some sort of historical perspective. Misgivings about rights are not a newphenomenon. Just as the theories of natural rights and of the rights of man thatdeveloped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the ancestors of the modernidea of human rights, so the critiques of those theories that appeared in that periodare the starting-point of modern misgivings about the direction this idea is takingus in our moral and political thinking.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that, there is nothing new in the moderndiscussion of rights. There are many features that distinguish it from the debates towhich the texts presented here were contributions. For example modernrights-theorists are more interested than their eighteenth-century ancestors in whatare now known as welfare rights and in the idea that rights mayexpress claims about need and not merely individual freedom. That means moderntheories can take on a more radical aspect than the traditional theories of classicliberalism. It is no longer widely believed that one has to step outside the idiom ofrights in order to criticize socio-economic (as opposed to legal and political)arrangements in society. On the other side of the debate, the explicit development ofsophisticated ‘two-level’ theories of utilitarianism now lends much greatercredibility to the claim that whatever is of value in the idea of human rights can beaccommodated without abandoning the tradition of utilitarian argument. And on bothsides there is a much greater willingness to separate the issue of rights from moreabstract ‘meta-ethical’ questions about the reality and objectivity of moral standards. Talk of rights is no longerseen as posing any greater difficulty in this regard than talk of moral values ormoral obligation.

Even so, many of the issues have remained remarkably constant. The abstractuniversalism of this sort of theory, the individualism of rights, the tension betweenrights and the demands of community, the use of social contract models in the theoryof politics, the absolutism and apparent oversimplification of the claims that rightsexpress, the use and abuse of reason and a priorism in political argument, and thetroubled idea of natural law – these issues which lie at the epicentre of the moderncontroversy have a history as long as the idea of human rights itself. In a recentbook Richard Tuck has shown that the modern controversy between the so-called‘Choice’ and ‘Benefit’ theories of rights has its roots in the medieval and earlymodern emergence of the concept of a right out of the Roman law notions ofius and dominium.³ I am hoping to do something similar in this book – though on a much moremodest scale – for the modern debate about the abstraction and individualism of thissort of theory. I should add, however, that this is not intended primarily as anexercise in the history of ideas. The aim is to deepen our understanding of thedispute without diminishing the enthusiasm with which we participate in it. I want todo that by focusing on the historical longevity of these misgivings and the perennialcharacter of the controversies they give rise to.

The discussion in this volume centres around three texts: some extracts from EdmundBurke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France; a substantialpiece from a work by Jeremy Bentham known as Anarchical Fallacies(together with a section from one of his papers on fiscal policy entitled ‘SupplyWithout Burthen’); and part of a review essay written by the young Karl Marx entitled‘On the Jewish Question’. Bringing these texts together illustrates strikingly thediversity of viewpoints from which the idea of human rights may be, and has been,attacked. To label them crudely, we have here critiques written from a conservative,a liberal and a socialist point of view. But given that diversity, what is remarkableabout these texts is the number of common themes. Bentham, Burke and Marx all attackhuman rights for what they call their ‘abstraction’; they all focus on the theme ofindividualism versus community, though their respective conceptions of community areof course very different; and they all claim that the rights of man involve aradically impoverished view of the constitution of human society. Looking at thesecritiques together reveals the richness and complexity of the ideas that lie behindsimple terms like ‘rights’, ‘individual’ and ‘community’. The great ideologies of the west –liberalism, socialism and conservatism – are not utterly alien to one another: theygrew up tog...