The Architecture of Concepts by de Bolla Peter

Author:de Bolla, Peter [de Bolla, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

“The Rights of Man Were but Imperfectly Understood at the Revolution”: The Architecture of Rights of Man

Any historical account of the concept of human rights in the eighteenth century must negotiate the reputation of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, for, whatever else may be said or believed about this book, it is incontrovertible that Paine’s counterblast to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France has had a very energetic afterlife. Claims on its behalf—as to its notoriety, the number of readers it attracted, and the corresponding number of copies either sold or printed—have been extravagant: It is not uncommon to see figures in the millions as indices to its readership.1 Although at the time of its publication it can accurately be said that it was a succès de scandale since both the author and publishers were prosecuted under the law for seditious libel, we still cannot say with any great confidence how many copies of this book were in circulation.2 For reasons that will become clear, this uncertainty about the size of circulation is far from insignificant in relation to the arguments put forward on behalf of the book by Paine and his supporters as well as his antagonists.3 It is important, in this regard, to note that it was certainly said, and perhaps by some if not many also believed, to have an unprecedented circulation. This feature of the event that was the publication and reception of Paine’s most famous text has undoubtedly contributed to our current conceptions of the history of “human rights,” which are conventionally said to find their origin in the late eighteenth century. If the claim to universality is taken to be the particular signature of the concept, then the ubiquity of Paine’s text as the means for its dissemination generated a parallel claim to the universal. Although I do not mean this observation to imply that a supposedly very large scale circulation of Paine’s text (certainly not universal, but nevertheless said to be larger than any other text of the period) is identical to a claim for its presenting or encapsulating ideas that were taken to be universal, or that could be said to speak for (and to) humanity at large, it is nevertheless my intention to remark the easily made elision between the very wide circulation of specific ideas within a culture and a claim to universality. When the idea in question is itself one that is founded on its absolute generality—a human right is said to be the most general there can be since it is coeval with being—particular care needs to be exercised in order to ensure that distinct applications of the notion of universality are not confused. Consequently, no matter what Paine himself may have thought or believed, it is not wise to uncritically assume that “the rights of man” were either intended to describe the most general or common attribution of rights to the species, or even prospectively desired to become universal, if one is to understand that claim to universality as having its basis in the essence of the human.

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