We are so familiar with the use of the concept of human rights to limit the powers of government that we may be surprised to learn that most early modern natural-rights theorists argued that rational individuals would give up their natural rights to absolute rulers for the sake of social order. However, in the English Civil War the Levellers adopted the concept of individual, inalienable rights and maintained that Parliament was violating them. Richard Overton argued that all governments were trusts, because by nature everyone had a ‘self propriety’ which could not be invaded or usurped without his consent. The concept of ‘self propriety’ entailed freedom of conscience, equal rights in law, and the right of at least the majority of men to vote. John Wildman thought that the concept of natural rights entailed the principle of universal suffrage. The Levellers held that persons were prior to estates, which justified the right to subsistence and the legitimation of some redistribution of wealth (McNally 1989: 35–7).
By grounding rights in the law of nature, the Levellers emancipated such claims from historical precedents. Overton maintained that reason had no precedent, for reason was the fountain of all just precedents. Arguments from reason were, however, mixed with arguments from history, including references to the Magna Carta. This mixture of natural-law and historical argument created some ambiguity as to whether the rights claimed were those of Englishmen or universal human rights. The Bill of Rights (1688) was concerned with vindicating the ancient rights of Englishmen, not human rights.
The deep ground for opposition to political absolutism in seventeenth-century England was the Protestant belief that God had made human beings rational so that each could determine their own way to salvation. This entailed free will, the legitimacy of independent action and dissent from authority. All men were born free and equal, and no one was subject to the absolute will of any other person. Rational individuals constituted a natural moral community in which each owed moral obligations to others and to God. Everyone could, by the use of their reason, discover these obligations contained in the law of nature. This law not only imposed duties on, but also accorded rights to individuals, including, especially, the right to follow the dictates of one’s conscience.
In his Essay on Toleration John Locke argued that man was a rational and active creature. Religious faith, therefore, must be active, and required liberty of action. The political authorities ought not to interfere with religious beliefs, since they concerned only the relation between the individual and God. The individual had a natural right to freedom of religion, both because salvation was infinitely more important than any political relation, and because political authorities were fallible in matters of religion.
In the Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, Locke held that each individual had a responsibility to God to observe the law of nature. Every man was rational in that he could know the law of nature. God willed the preservation of mankind, and this imposed on everyone the obligation not to violate the natural rights of others to their lives, health, liberty and possessions. In ‘the state of nature’, in the absence of government, everyone had the right to self-defence and to enforce the laws of nature. Since everyone was judge in their own cause, they would be partial to themselves, and this would lead to conflict. Rational individuals would therefore agree to live under a government that was entrusted to enforce the law of nature, protect the natural rights of all through the rule of law and to promote the public good. Governments that breached this trust, and that systematically and persistently violated the rights of the people, were tyrannies, lost the authority to rule, and might be resisted by the people by force if necessary (Locke [1689] 1970). Locke’s political theory entails a rejection of the ‘Magna Carta’ or ‘ancient constitution’ ground for resisting unjust government.
Locke is usually interpreted as a theorist of an individualist conception of natural rights. This interpretation is supported by Locke’s belief that each individual had fundamental obligations to God, was endowed with reason, and had a natural right to freedom, which was limited only by the obligation to respect the natural rights of others. Nevertheless, he also held that God’s will for mankind could be achieved, and the natural rights of men could be protected, only in a political community, and that this community should be governed for the public good. There is, therefore, an unresolved tension in Locke’s political theory between the natural rights of individuals and the collective good of society. The foundation of Locke’s theory in the will of God and the reason of Man supported his belief that individual rights and the public good were mutually compatible.
Locke argued that each individual had a property in himself, his labour and the products of his labour. Labour was the basis of the right to private property. Locke’s theory of property has been the subject of prolonged controversy. C. B. Macpherson interpreted Locke as a defender of ‘possessive individualism’ and of the interests of the bourgeois class (Macpherson 1962). Critics have pointed out that Locke’s theory of rights was set in a Christian, natural-law framework, and that property rights were subject to a set of moral obligations designed to provide for the common good and the benefit of mankind. Locke’s theory of property clearly allows for considerable inequality of wealth, but accords to everyone the natural right to subsistence, and imposes on those who have excessive wealth the obligation to aid those who cannot meet their subsistence needs by their own efforts (Tully 1980; Waldron 1988).
Locke’s attitude to women was ambiguous: women might acquire property through their labour and had certain rights in marriage. Men had ultimate authority in the family, however, because they were ‘abler and stronger’. It is not clear whether women could participate in politics (Hirschmann and McClure 2007).
Several scholars have linked Locke’s defence of property with his support for British colonialism. In the Second Treatise Locke asserts that God commanded Mankind to cultivate unappropriated land, particularly in America. This expressed the so-called ‘agriculturalist argument’ for European rights to American land. Locke’s liberal theory of rights, therefore, justified British colonialism.
Locke was secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the colony of Carolina from 1669 to 1673. In 1669 the Proprietors adopted The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which provided for religious freedom in the colony but also assumed the legitimacy of slavery and granted the slave-owners absolute power over the slaves. The authorship of The Constitutions is uncertain, but it is probable that Locke was involved in their drafting: in the Two Treatises Locke assumed the legitimacy of slavery (Armitage 2004). Locke is regarded as a pioneering philosopher of liberal rights and freedoms; scholars do not agree on how, if at all, this can be reconciled with his complicity with African slavery. Locke held that slavery was justifiable only as a punishment for unjust war. Since Africans had not conducted an unjust war against the English, New World slavery would seem to be illegitimate according to Locke’s own theory (Farr 2008). We may conclude that racism blinded Locke to this contradiction (Bernasconi and Mann 2005). Others maintain that Locke was not a racist but a Christian universalist who believed that all human beings were fundamentally rational and that actual differences in rationality were caused by differences in environment (Farr 2008; Armitage 2012). The contradiction between Locke’s liberalism and his endorsement of slavery is unresolved.
The age of revolutions
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 the Lockean principles of constitutional monarchy and the rights to life, liberty and property became part of Whig (liberal) ideology, although the radical, egalitarian thrust of natural-rights theory was muted. In the later eighteenth century, however, radical Whigs appealed to the right of the people to reform or remove a government that did not protect their rights. The natural right to freedom of conscience was held to entail the principle that the state