Since 1776, no word in the Declaration of Independence has received more attention than Jefferson`s phrase, “All men are created equal.” But how could Jefferson and the other signatories of the Declaration believe this if there was slavery in the colonies? Some slave owners argued that slaves would become equal and worthy of natural rights only if they were civilized. For Jefferson, a lifelong slave owner, this was a much more complex issue. The 17th century English philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as “life, liberty and property (property)” and arguing that such fundamental rights could not be abandoned in the social contract. The preservation of the natural rights to life, liberty and property was invoked to justify the rebellion of the American colonies. As George Mason noted in his draft Virginia Bill of Rights, “all men are born equally free” and possess “certain inherent natural rights of which they cannot deprive or deprive their descendants by treaty.” [19] Another 17th century Englishman, John Lilburne (known as Freeborn John), who came into conflict with both the monarchy of King Charles I and the military dictatorship of the republic led by Oliver Cromwell, argued for fundamental human rights rights, which he called “born free rights”. which he defined as rights with which every human being is born. as opposed to government or human rights. The theory of natural law was an essential part of the Enlightenment, as evidenced by the writings of Grotius, Locke and Pufendorf in the seventeenth century and Vattel and Burlamaqui in the eighteenth century. Revealed by reason, natural law was for these thinkers a universal prepolitical norm of human action that morally limited individuals and regimes. Natural rights, understood as those that do not depend on the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular culture or government (and therefore universal and inalienable), were central to Enlightenment debates about the relationship between the individual and government. There have been three notable such attempts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered the best known, most radical and most influential, embracing the “common will” as the infallible and universal source of all legitimate authority.

Like natural law, the general will was rationally recognizable and binding, but it was also rooted in what was considered, at least for Rousseau, to be the empirically given reality of any political union. This doctrine was therefore very different from one community to another, but it was considered safe and scientifically respectable, descriptive and prescriptive. Not surprisingly, it proved to be a powerful weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of the French Revolution. Like Rousseau, the physiocrats Mirabeau and Quesnay sought an ultimate source of normative judgment that was both descriptive and normative. In their case, however, this source was pre-civilized in nature, which favored agriculture as the only productive sector of political economy. Physiocracy was not a revolutionary creed like the “common will” (most of its adherents attributed to the doctrine of “legal despotism”), but it led to an overtly liberal laissez-faire model of economic policy to maximize agricultural productivity. Still others combined the fundamental ideas of physiocratic political economy with the empirical facts of human sensitivity. Known as sensationists or “ideologues,” these thinkers were mostly Condillac students, such as Helvétius, Condorcet, Cabanis, Tracy, and others. Their metaphysical analysis—so unique among critics of the natural law of the Enlightenment—and their materialistic reading of human sensibility meant that humanity necessarily sought to avoid pain and satisfy its desires and desires. Given the universality of this fact, they claimed to show that a broadly republican and liberal political order was the only way to achieve these goals. Like natural law, any of these “replacements” could be used to legitimize and/or criticize government policy and moral judgment. Both also claimed the same certainty and universality of natural law, but all three sought to anchor the source of normative truth in “facts,” a strategy that would culminate in County positivism.

Many historical excuses for slavery and illiberal government were based on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts to alienate all “natural rights” to freedom and self-determination. [23] The de facto inalienability arguments of Hutcheson and his predecessors formed the basis of the anti-slavery movement, arguing not only against involuntary slavery, but against all explicit or implicit contractual forms of slavery. Any contract that attempts to legally dispose of such a right would be inherently invalid. Similarly, the argument has been used by the democratic movement to argue against all explicit or implicit social contracts of submission (pactum subjectionis) by which a people is supposed to alienate its right to self-government from a sovereign, as in Thomas Hobbes` Leviathan. According to Ernst Cassirer, the intellectual struggle for the articulation of the theory of classical liberalism has often been as bitterly contested as the physical struggle for its political realization.