This paper examines the philosophical origins of individual rights in England and America prior to the United States Constitutional Convention. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as primary sources including the Articles of Confederation, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and Madison's convention notes, the paper argues that the concept of individual rights evolved gradually and unevenly. It traces the idea from the Magna Carta through Cromwell's Parliament and Locke's natural rights theory, showing how the Founding Fathers adapted — but also complicated — these traditions, particularly in their conflation of state sovereignty with individual liberty and their exclusion of enslaved people from the category of rights-bearing persons.
Although many people today romanticize the origin of individual rights in America — suggesting that such rights began and ended with the passage of the United States Constitution — the actual history of a private citizen's individual rights in England and America is far more checkered and complex. America's Founding Fathers owe a far greater debt to English and French philosophies of rights and liberties than was acknowledged at the time, particularly the idea that the individual citizen possesses certain inalienable rights that cannot be impinged upon by the state. The Articles of Confederation that were eventually passed contained the seeds of the later governing document, even though the Articles were too weak to provide the type of unity that the international politics of the time demanded in order to accord respect to the new American union.
The English Empiricist philosopher John Locke was one of the first thinkers to articulate "life, liberty, and property" as inalienable rights belonging to every human person. Equally important as the precise definition of those rights was the fundamental notion itself — that individual citizens possessed rights intrinsic to their mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual persons that no sovereign could legitimately impinge upon. Unlike earlier political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, who placed priority on an orderly society under the will of a monarch, Locke turned his attention to the rights of the human being within society, rather than focusing on the state or on society alone as an entity in need of order and protection.
Thomas Jefferson later took up Locke's philosophy and language. As Jefferson concisely and eloquently stated in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and [certain] inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, & organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness."
"Happiness" rather than "property" held sway in Jefferson's rhetoric, for the Declaration was a rhetorical rather than a strictly legal or philosophical document. Still, the underlying principles remained the same as those articulated in Locke's philosophy. Jefferson also paid a nod to Hobbes in the Declaration's text: "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses & usurpations begun at a distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, & to provide new guards for their future security."
Jefferson acknowledges the risks of disorder that severance from an established government poses, but argues that the risks of tyranny to the individual are ultimately more in need of address than the risks posed to social order.
"English roots of rights from Magna Carta onward"
"State rights prioritized over individual rights in Articles"
"Enslaved people excluded from Founders' rights framework"
Thus, the concept of individual rights was an old one, extending back to the early history of England, and yet it remained a concept far different from and in need of evolution to reach our modern understanding of what constitutes an individual. In Madison's notes on the daily debates surrounding the Confederation, we read: "Mr. Sharman proposed that the proportion of suffrage in the 1st branch should be according to the respective numbers of free inhabitants; and that in the second branch or Senate, each State should have one vote and no more. He said as the States would remain possessed of certain individual rights, each State ought to be able to protect itself: otherwise a few large States will rule the rest. The House of Lords in England he observed had certain particular rights under the Constitution, and hence they have an equal vote with the House of Commons that they may be able to defend their rights."
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