does anyone have a simple account of how and why the discourse of duty came to be at least partially supplanted by the discourse of rights
Making this up as I go along, but I'm guessing that first you get a justification for rebellion against princes (from the English civil war onwards), which disrupts the mutual obligations of a feudal relationship and opens the way for the idea of rights attached to an individual (as vindicated by Paine and Wollstonecraft and formalized in the American constitution), and which in C. 19th British political theory becomes the "freedom to" and "freedom from" of liberalism.
I suppose, to do the discourse of rights justice, there's an implication of mutual interdependence and obligations in the idea of the "social contract", but IIRC the contract is generally seen as a constraint?
no subject
Making this up as I go along, but I'm guessing that first you get a justification for rebellion against princes (from the English civil war onwards), which disrupts the mutual obligations of a feudal relationship and opens the way for the idea of rights attached to an individual (as vindicated by Paine and Wollstonecraft and formalized in the American constitution), and which in C. 19th British political theory becomes the "freedom to" and "freedom from" of liberalism.
I suppose, to do the discourse of rights justice, there's an implication of mutual interdependence and obligations in the idea of the "social contract", but IIRC the contract is generally seen as a constraint?