Does Nature Confer Rights?

This chapter takes Hannah Arendt’s engagement with Edmund Burke in Origins of Totalitarianism as a starting-point for considering the interrelation in the Revolution controversy of nature, history, and rights. Evidence is presented of a mode of argumentation that is (by today’s standards) eclectic and historicising. Thus, the rights of man were at once natural and historical, and while Thomas Paine asserted the novelty of their study, Thomas Spence framed his exposition of the ‘real rights of man’ with reference to an older tradition that links him to the people and events touched on in earlier chapters of this book.

Two Early Modern Revolts

This chapter continues the discussion of early English social criticism with a consideration of two uprisings of the early modern period: Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and the Midland Rising (1607). These uprisings were formidable instances of organised resistance to enclosure and related changes, and the texts which have come down to us concerning them connect that resistance to a belief in the original equality of all human beings, the common humanity of rich and poor, and the fundamental right of everyone to live (including the right to buy essential provisions at a fair and affordable price).

The French Revolution Controversy

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

Enclosure and its Critics

The focus of this chapter is a series of texts by sixteenth-century English social critics: Edmund Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth, Thomas More’s Utopia and Robert Crowley’s The Way to Wealth and other works. Inasmuch as these texts were composed at a moment of great change, the chapter highlights, in particular, concerns about enclosure. Alterations in land tenure and the extinguishment of rights of common were impoverishing ordinary people and depriving them of their capacity to live independently of wage-labour. The way to wealth for some was the way to poverty for others.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s enquiry into the idea of the rights of man in eighteenth-century England and into the earlier glimmerings of that idea in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English thought. If protection of the right to property is an implicit and sometimes explicit principle of international human rights law, the chapter raises the question of whether there may exist an alternative tradition of thought about human rights, in which what is important is not the right to property, but instead the dispossession of the unpropertied.

Trees and Liberty

Trees feature repeatedly in the preceding chapters of this book — whether as metaphors or in the material form of forests, hedges, and wood. As a way of drawing the various strands of the discussion together, this chapter foregrounds that arboreal preoccupation. Among other things, it highlights the trope of the tree of liberty, and finds not one, but three liberty trees in the public discourse of 1790s England, one of which identifies the rights of man promoted by Thomas Paine and others with a ‘false tree of liberty’ that would cause people to rise up and governments to be overthrown but oppression still to remain.

Afterword

If the ‘Paineite’ approach associates the rights of man with popular sovereignty, together with social welfare and decent wages, the ‘Spencean’ approach insists that political revolution needs to be accompanied by social revolution, and remedial measures by efforts to seek out and transform the roots of injustice. It is, of course, the former that has been most important in shaping the course of history (including the history of human rights), and that is most familiar today. This Afterword gives brief consideration to the question of what it might mean to recover the Spencean alternative in a world of ‘new enclosures’ and ‘new commons’.

Rights in the English Revolution

This chapter examines discussions of rights in the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, focusing in particular on the Putney Debates and on the ideas put forward shortly afterwards by Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow Diggers. A key issue in the Putney Debates was the extension of the right to vote to men without property. That was also important for the Diggers, but in addition they argued for the right of all to direct access to the means of subsistence. The earth was a common treasury for all, wrote Winstanley, and could not justly be turned into a particular treasury for some.

Improvement and the Real Rights of Man

In completing the book’s discussion of the contested significance of the rights of man in the Revolution controversy, this chapter directs attention to contemporaneous developments affecting land. Thanks to the process of Parliamentary enclosure, the second half of the eighteenth century saw the privatisation of virtually all remaining common land in England. What did it mean, in that context, to assert the right to live? The most influential account emphasised welfare and wages. In contrast, Thomas Spence put forward an alternative vision in which the focus was on the social-structural conditions in which security of subsistence could be achieved.

In the Shadow of Dearth

Mid-1790s England saw an episode of fearful dearth. This chapter continues discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in the Revolution Controversy, in the light of approaches to dearth which emphasised, on the one hand, the moral economy of the poor and, on the other hand and alternatively, the new ‘political economy’ of laissez faire. It transpires that, for Thomas Paine and other proponents of the rights of man such as John Thelwall, the rights of the living were not simply a matter of political control and popular sovereignty. The living also had the right to live.