Rights, Liberties, Freedoms: A Reappraisal

When President Roosevelt proclaimed the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, he accepted a new conception of human rights far removed from the natural rights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conception of rights which inspired the British Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) is grounded in simple natural law notions. Man was believed to have a fixed and unalterable nature, to be endowed with reason, which gave him certain rights without which he ceased to be a human being. These natural rights, summed up in the Lockean formula of “life, liberty and property” (later broadened to include the pursuit of happiness), were largely concerned with protecting the individual person against governmental power. Each man was seen as entitled to a personal sphere of autonomy, more especially of religious conviction and property; the inner and the outer man in his basic self-realization and self-fulfillment. These rights depended in turn upon the still more crucial right to life-that is to say, to the self itself in terms of physical survival and protection against bodily harm. This right to life was recognized even by absolutists, like Thomas Hobbes. It was believed immutable, inalienable, inviolable. Locke exclaimed at one point that these rights no one had the power to part with, and hence no government could ever acquire the right to violate them.