Rights of Man

Examples of Rights of Man in the following topics:

• The Declaration of the Rights of Man

  • The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1791) is a fundamental document of the French Revolution and in the history of human and civil rights.
  • In August 1789, Honoré Mirabeau played a central role in conceptualizing and drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
  • Modelled on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, it exposes the failure of the French Revolution, which had been devoted to equality.
  • The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789  by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier.
  • Identify the main points in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

• The First Amendment

  • The First Amendment to the US Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights, and protects core American civil liberties.
  • A French revolutionary document, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed just weeks before Congress proposed the Bill of Rights, contains certain guarantees that are similar to those in the First Amendment.
  • Lastly, the First Amendment was one of the first guarantees of religious freedom: neither the English Bill of Rights nor the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen contain a similar guarantee.
  • The US Bill of Rights drew many of its First Amendment provisions from other countries' bill of rights, such as the English Bill of Rights.
  • However, the US Bill of Rights established more liberties than the English Bill of Rights.

• The Rights of Englishmen

  • "The rights of Englishmen" refers to unwritten constitutional rights and liberties, originating in Britain peaking in the Enlightenment.
  • "The rights of Englishmen" is a concept used to describe a tradition of unwritten constitutional rights and liberties, originating in Britain, from which many Anglo-American declarations of rights have drawn inspiration.
  • Among other important clauses, Magna Carta forbade the king from arbitrarily punishing any free man without due process of law and decreed that all nobles were to be judged by a jury of peers.
  • For instance, in 1690, John Locke (one of the fathers of the English Enlightenment) wrote that all people have fundamental natural rights to "life, liberty and property," and that governments were created in order to protect these rights.
  • Essentially, Lockean conceptions of political rights included the right of man to determine the political structure that would oversee the protection of his natural rights.

• Natural Rights

  • Natural rights are usually juxtaposed with the concept of legal rights.
  • Thomas Hobbes' conception of natural rights extended from his conception of man in a "state of nature."
  • In his natural state, according to Hobbes, man's life consisted entirely of liberties and not at all of laws.
  • For Locke, the law of nature is grounded on mutual security, or the idea that one cannot infringe on another's natural rights, as every man is equal and has the same inalienable rights.
  • Thomas Paine further elaborated on natural rights in his influential work Rights of Man (1791), emphasizing that rights cannot be granted by any charter because this would legally imply they can also be revoked and under such circumstances they would be reduced to privileges.

• Thomas Hobbes

  • Hobbes also included a discussion of natural rights in his moral and political philosophy.
  • His' conception of natural rights extended from his conception of man in a "state of nature."
  • In his natural state, man's life consisted entirely of liberties and not at all of laws, which leads to the world of chaos created by unlimited rights.
  • Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from "natural law," arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations.
  • Since by our (human) nature, we seek to maximize our well being, rights are prior to law, natural or institutional, and people will not follow the laws of nature without first being subjected to a sovereign power, without which all ideas of right and wrong are meaningless.

• Sculpture in the Greek Geometric Period

  • Relatively naturalistic rendering of human legs is also evident in Man and Centaur, also known as Heracles and Nessos (c. 750-730 BCE).
  • Without the equine back and hind legs, the centaur portion of the sculpture is a shorter man with human legs.
  • Like the seated man above, the two figures feature elongated arms, with the right arm of the centaur forming one continuous line with the left arm of the man.
  • While the the seated man appears to be clean-shaven, the figures in Man and Centaur wear beards, which usually symbolized maturity.
  • The hollowed eye sockets of the figure of the man probably once held inlay for a more realistic appearance.

• The Sick Man of Europe

• The Spread of Democracy

  • The fact that a man was now legally allowed to vote did not necessarily mean that he routinely did vote in practice.
  • Inducing potential voters to exercise their right at the polls became the objective of local political parties, who began systematically seeking out supporters in their communities.
  • Similarly, Jacksonian democracy sought greater input to the democratic process for the common man.
  • The Whigs became the inheritors of Jeffersonian Democracy in terms of promoting schools and colleges.
  • Andrew Jackson inspired a wave of political participation among "the common man

• The Democratization of the Political Arena

  • Expanded Suffrage: The Jacksonians believed that voting rights should be extended to all white men.
  • Many Jacksonians held the view that rotating political appointees in and out of office was not only the right, but also the duty, of winners in political contests.
  • Jackson said that he would guard against "all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty. " This is not to say that Jackson was a states' rights extremist; indeed, the Nullification Crisis would find Jackson fighting against what he perceived as state encroachments on the proper sphere of federal influence.
  • An important movement in the period from 1800 to 1830—before the Jacksonians were organized—was the expansion of the right to vote to include all white men.
  • The fact that a man was now legally allowed to vote did not necessarily mean he routinely did vote.

• Hammurabi's Code

  • One of the most well-known sections of the Code was law #196: "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.
  • If one break a man's bone, they shall break his bone.
  • If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price."
  • The amelu was originally an elite person with full civil rights, whose birth, marriage and death were recorded.
  • The mushkenu was a free man who may have been landless.