Ebook: Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man

'Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts.' - Jeremy Bentham

In Nonsense upon Stilts, first published in 1987, Waldron includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Each text is prefaced by an historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes. The collection as a whole in introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the eighteenth-century idea of natural rights which they attacked.

But the point of reproducing these works is not merely historical. Modern attacks on 'rights-based' political philosophy mirror the concerns of Bentham, Burke and Marx. Jeremy Waldron has therefore added an extensive concluding essay which relates these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights and re-examines the idea of rights in the light of contemporary critiques. This text provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in politics and philosophy.

What are rights and who can grant them? Can they be taken away? Are they defined and prescribed by law, or are they inherent in nature?

In the long-awaited new edition of Nonsense Upon Stilts, Jeremy Waldron addresses all of these enduring and timely questions, while making accessible to students four fundamental but seldom read texts in the literature on human rights. He includes and discusses extracts from three classic critiques of the idea of natural rights embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Bentham’s Anarchical Fallacies, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Marx’s On the Jewish Question, as well as the whole of the declaration itself. Each text is prefaced by a historical introduction and an analysis of its main themes, showing how these issues are as pertinent and controversial today as they were at the time of the French Revolution. The collection as a whole is introduced with an essay tracing the philosophical background to the three critiques as well as the idea of natural rights which they attacked.

Over twenty years after the publication of the first edition, Waldron has revisited Nonsense Upon Stilts to relate these classic texts to the modern discussion of rights, addressing topical issues such as individual rights versus public security in the context of the war on terror; the impact of economic globalisation on human rights; and the difficulty of defining universal human rights across diverse cultures and religious sytems and in a variety of very different human situations.

Nonsense Upon Stilts provides an invaluable teaching tool for courses in human rights, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the history ideas, and legal theory. It should be read by anyone who thinks there is a difference between taking rights seriously and taking them for granted.

Jeremy Waldron is Professor of Law at the New York University Law School and Chichele Professor in Social and Political Theory at All Souls College University of Oxford Columbia University.