| Rights of Man |
Title page from the first edition |
| Author(s) |
Thomas Paine |
| Country |
Britain |
| Language |
English |
| Subject(s) |
The French Revolution |
| Publication date |
1791 |
Rights of Man (1791), a book by Thomas Paine, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard its people, their natural rights, and their national interests. Using these points as a base it defends the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).[1]
Arguments
Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges:
It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few... They... consequently are instruments of injustice.
The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
Government's sole purpose is safeguarding the family and their inherent, inalienable rights; each societal institution that does not benefit the nation is illegitimate — especially the monarchy, the nobility, and the military.[citation needed] The book's acumen derives from the Age of Enlightenment, especially from the Second Treatise of Government, by John Locke.[citation needed]
Aristocracy
Principally, Rights of Man opposes the idea of hereditary government — the belief that dictatorial government is necessary, because of man's corrupt, essential nature. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund Burke says that true social stability arises if the nation's poor majority are governed by a minority of wealthy aristocrats, and that lawful inheritance of power (wealth, religious, governing) ensured the propriety of political power being the exclusive domain of the nation's élite social class — the nobility.
Rights of Man denounces Burke's assertion of the nobility's inherent hereditary wisdom; countering the implication that a nation has not a right to form a Government for governing itself. Paine refutes Burke's definition of Government as "a contrivance of human wisdom". Instead, Paine argues that Government is a contrivance of man, and it follows that hereditary succession and hereditary rights to govern cannot compose a Government — because the wisdom to govern cannot be inherited.
Public impact
The publication of Rights of Man caused a furor in England; Thomas Paine was tried in absentia, and convicted for seditious libel against the Crown, but was unavailable for hanging, having departed England for France.
Thomas Paine was not the only advocate of the rights of man or the only author of a work titled Rights of Man. The working-class radical, Thomas Spence, is amongst the first, in England, to use the phrase as a title. His 1775 lecture, usually titled The Rights of Man, and his later The Rights of Infants, offer a proto-communist government alternative to Paine's democratic offering.[2]
See also
References
