Rights, Property, and Politics

• In Event: Inequality in the Enlightenment: New Work on the “Jealousy of Trade”

Abstract

A change took place in the theory of justice between David Hume and G. W. F. Hegel. One event that helps explain this shift was French Revolution. Justice, for Hume, was a matter of right rooted in the principle of private property. He shared this view with Montesquieu, Burke and Rousseau. For each of these, despite their differences, a key purpose of modern political regimes was to guarantee the imprescriptible rights of property. In the 1790s, this consensus came under increasing pressure. Now, the spectre of inequality haunted political debate with a new and insistent force. Paine devised schemes for addressing social disparities. Hegel examined the limits of the luxury economy and the means to remedy its excesses. With this, the political economy of the eighteenth century began to lose some of its credibility. Soon, arguments about the injustice of absolute property rights gained an ascendancy over those concerning the corrupting effects of wealth.

Author

• Richard Bourke, University of Cambridge