? For the Israelis, the war lasted for 34 days. We tend to forget that for Hezbollah, it is infinite. | Main | tl;dr ?
April 09, 2009
Imaginary rights
Peter Hitchens relates an introduction to Jeremy Bentham and the ghastly French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the "founding scripture of several gory tyrannies." Not the least of which is Canada under its new constitution; a document which derives its authority from God only to deny Him at its human rights commissions.
It is in England, rather than in France, said Bentham, that the discovery of the rights of man ought naturally to have taken its rise: it is we - we English, that have the better right to it...Our right to this precious discovery, such as it is, of the rights of man, must, I repeat it, have been prior to that of the French. It has been seen how peculiarly rich we are in materials for making it. Right, the substantive right, is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 9, 2009 06:57 AM
