THE RIGHTS OF MEN

The Rights of Men

The Rights of Men

Introduction

Rights of men has been so important throughout the human history that the call for individual human rights and liberty lead to the revolution-including the French Revolution. Liberals from the revolutionary age demanded to worship according to the dictates of their consciences, and wanted an end to censorship. They also sought after freedom from arbitrary laws and from judges who simply obeyed orders from the government. The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed, "Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm another person." The declaration also gave people more privileges and civil liberties. The document stated that the citizen's rights had "no limits except those which assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights." Due to the monarchial and absolutist forms of government dominating Europe at the time, this idea was considered radical. This paper discusses the rights of men and compares and contrasts the different philosophies of notable philosopher-The arguments of Edmond Burke and Thomas Paine and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in a concise and comprehensive way.

Discussion: A Comparison and Contrast

From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion than to change it.

At the time Mr. Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National Assembly, I was in Paris, and had written to him but a short time before to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this I saw his advertisement of the Pamphlet he intended to publish: As the attack was to be made in a language but little studied, and less understood in France, and as everything suffers by translation, I promised some of the friends of the Revolution in that country that whenever Mr. Burke's Pamphlet came forth, I would answer it. This appeared to me the more necessary to be done, when I saw the flagrant misrepresentations which Mr. Burke's Pamphlet contains; and that while it is an outrageous abuse on the French Revolution, and the principles of Liberty, it is an imposition on the rest of the world (Burke, 1999).

In economics, as Adam Smith contended, Burke and he thought exactly alike. Burke's main economic work, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795), was written for Prime Minister William Pitt in opposition to a proposal that the government subsidize agricultural wages. The work was published posthumously in 1800. In it Burke saw no role whatever for the state in economic life. He believed it is not prudent for the state to provide for the necessities of the people because the government can do “very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else” (Burke, 1999). State redistribution of wealth harms the rich without ...