Not everyone agreed with Barker when he wrote those words. Few students of the Politics would agree with him today. Disagreement comes from different sides. On one hand--the "rights" hand, one might call it--Karl Popper argued in 1945 in The Open Society and its Enemies that Aristotle's essentialism was less interesting than Platonism but equally congenial to modern totalitarianism. On the other hand--call it the "anti-rights" hand --scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre and the legal historian Michel Villey would have it (...) that the whole modern conception of rights, especially human or natural rights, is a pernicious fabrication of the Enlightenment, with roots going back no further than the similarly pernicious nominalism of William of Ockham. As far as the current consensus is concerned, then, whether one favors rights or not, and whether one admires Aristotle or not, there are no rights--or at least no individual natural rights--in Aristotle. (shrink)

Ockham is sometimes regarded as the chief source for a view of rights as arbitrary powers of radically isolated individuals. In fact he provides a quintessentially “reasonable” conception of natural or human rights, one which suggests a promising answer to the question of what such rights are, namely, capacities for reasonable activity. This view of personal rights is complemented by Ockham’s equally reasonable and suggestive account of what is naturally “right” for human communities in different human conditions. The unusual situation (...) in which Ockham developed these ideas—as a theologian attacking the doctrinal pronouncements of a reigning pope—raises problems for extracting a systematic philosophical theory from his voluminous output, but the polemical setting of his political writings also gives them a certain relevance to current disputes about the place of secular thought in religious contexts. (shrink)