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Rights, socialism and liberalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
Extract
In his recent book, The Left and Rights, Tom Campbell argues that the concept of an individual right has no special or exclusive connection with the political philosophy of liberalism, or with the legal order of a liberal society. The belief that there is some such connection has been shared by both the revolutionary left and the libertarian right. Campbell argues that both groups falsely attribute to the concept of a right features that are contingently associated with the particular rights enforced in bourgeois society. A socialist society, he argues, would have good reason to accord and respect certain individual rights even though these might differ in content, and perhaps in form, from the classic rights of liberal individualism.
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- Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1985
References
1. (London 1983).
2. Op cit, p 123.
3. Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Oxford 1971), p 129–130 Google Scholar.
4. Campbell op tit, p 9.
5. Inga Markovits ‘Socialist vs Bourgeois Rights — An East-West German Comparison’ (1978) 45 U Chi LR 612 at 615.
6. See Brenkert, George C. Brenkert Marx's Ethics of Freedom (London 1983)Google Scholar; McMurtry, John The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton 1978)Google Scholar.
7. G. A. Cohen suggests that, so far as conditions of scarcity go, Marx would sympathise with the bourgeois claim that suppression of the market leads to political tyranny: see G. A. Marx's, Cohen Karl Theory of History (Oxford 1978), p 125 Google Scholar.
8. Campbell follows this general line, asserting that ‘the pleasures of isolated indulgence are not to be equated with those of active communal creativity’ (p 140) — though the contrast here between indulgence and creativity seems highly tendentious. What if we contrasted ‘isolated creativity’ with ‘communal indulgence’?.
9. Markovits loc cit.
10. Campbell op cit, p 18.
11. Loc cit.
12. Op cit, p 22.
13. In a sense I am suggesting that we should be concerned with the ‘focal meaning’ of ‘rights’ and agreeing with Finnis that such an investigation of focal meaning cannot be separated from the substantive enterprise of practical moral inquiry. But it is surprising that Finnis does not himself seek the focal sense of ‘rights’, preferring a diluted account which will even accommodate talk of rights to be rescued from one's own folly by paternalistic action: see John Finnis Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980) p 222.
14. Campbell op cit, p 83.
15. E. B. Pashukanis Law and Marxism, translated by B. Einhorn (London 1978), p 81.
16. Pashukanis loc cit.
17. MacCormick, D. N. ‘Rights in Legislation’ in Law, Morality and Society eds P. M. S. Hacker and J. Raz (Oxford 1977), p 205.Google Scholar
18. Campbell op cit, p 93.
19. Op cit, p 94.
20. Hillel Steiner ‘The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights’ (1977) Journal of Philosophy, p 767. Steiner argues that the only ‘compossible’ set of rights would be a set of titles to objects, a system of property. See also n 23 below.
21. Ronald Dworkin Taking Rights. Seriously (revised edn, London 1978), p 93.
22. Campbell op cit, p 93.
23. The right to freedom of speech conflicts with the right not to be defamed. Are not both of these ‘liberal’ rights? But on the approach I am describing, only the latter would be a right, since the ‘right to freedom of speech’ is not a right not to be interfered with. Of course, one would enjoy freedom of speech in so far as most of the obvious ways of interfering with that freedom are illegitimate. But the logically prior question is ‘what forms of interference are illegitimate?’ This approach sees the best solution to problems of freedom of speech in respect for property rights: see Murray Rothbard For a New Liberty, (revised edn, New York 1978), p 97. But for the problems posed by extensive public property, see Davis u Mussachusetts (1897) 167 US 43, and contrast Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 590 v Logan Valley Plaza (1968) 391 US 308, where it was held that the right to free speech might outweigh rights of private property.