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At the end of the eighteenth century the concept of natural rights was opposed by conservatives because it was too egalitarian and subversive, and by some radicals because it endorsed too much inequality of wealth. It suffered philosophically from uncertain foundations once its theological basis had faded. The violence of the French Revolution seemed to confirm the fears of the conservatives. The Revolution discredited the concept of natural rights in England, but did not hold back the movement for reform. Conservatives and reformers, therefore, sought alternatives to natural rights from different motives.

Edmund Burke did not reject the concept of natural rights completely. He recognized the natural rights to life, liberty, freedom of conscience, the fruits of one’s labour, property, and equal justice under the law. Nevertheless, he considered the concept generally to be, at best, a useless metaphysical abstraction, and, at worst, subversive of social order. Thus, the ‘real rights of men’ were social not natural rights. Burke distrusted all abstract theoretical ideas in the making of public policy, as he believed politics to be essentially a practical activity that involved the making of judgements in complex circumstances. The French revolutionary doctrine of the Rights of Man was dangerous because it was simplistic and dogmatic.

Although Burke subscribed to natural-law theory, he opposed the universalism of the natural-rights concept for its failure to take account of national and cultural diversity. This cultural relativism offered little to those who had to endure tyranny. Significantly, Burke appealed to the concept of natural rights when analysing what he regarded as intolerable tyrannies, such as Protestant rule in Ireland (Freeman 1980).

Jeremy Bentham rejected the concept of natural rights more thoroughly than Burke did. Bentham sought to establish law on a rational basis. This required the elimination of all concepts that were vague or fictitious. The concept of natural rights was both. Natural rights were supposed to derive from natural law, but this was fictitious. Once natural rights had been detached from the concept of divine law, Bentham argued, they were based on nothing at all. For Bentham the only rights were legal rights. The facts of pleasure and pain were the basis upon which rational laws could be built, and the object of ethics and politics was the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the common good. This was the principle of utility, which was an objective standard by which the goodness or badness of laws could be evaluated. Legal rights were valid in so far as they contributed to the common good. Natural rights were not only nonsense; they were also dangerous because they might make society unstable. Claims of natural rights were vague and so disputes over natural rights were likely to be settled by violence. Bentham believed that this explained the co-existence of the Rights of Man and violence in the French Revolution. Moreover, no rights could be absolute, because one rights-claim might conflict with another, but, if the scope of rights was limited, there must be clear criteria for limiting rights and resolving conflicts among rights-claims. The theory of natural rights could not give a clear account of the limits of rights, whereas the principle of utility could by evaluating rights-claims by their relative contribution to the general good. Both the appeal and the danger of natural-rights discourse lay in its simple dogmatism, and its refusal to engage in the hard intellectual work of thinking through the consequences of implementing general principles in the complex circumstances of society. The principle of utility should therefore be adopted, and that of natural rights should be rejected (Waldron 1987: 35–43). Bentham argued for the social and political equality of women well before most natural-rights theorists did so, advocating not only votes for women but also legislation to prevent domestic violence against women (Williford 1975).

In the nineteenth century Utilitarianism superseded the concept of natural rights as the theoretical basis of reform in both England and France. As the Revolution progressed, there was support in France for the view that the concept of natural rights was anarchic. A group of philosophers known as the Idéologues sought to set aside the concept of the Rights of Man, and to show how society could be reconstructed on the basis of a science of the mind with the aim of promoting happiness. They were, however, never able to convert their psychological theories into a convincing political programme (Welch 1984).

In contrast with this psychological approach, French social science moved away from the concern with political power and natural rights to an interest in economics. Economic science would deliver what natural rights had failed to. Saint-Simon proposed the organization of industrial society on a scientific basis that assigned priority to the social and economic over the political, the collective over the individual, and the scientific over the philosophical. The intellectual world of liberal political philosophy was left behind. The Lockean theory of property rights was transformed into the search for the laws of material production. The Saint-Simonians concluded that Utilitarianism under the conditions of industrialism required socialism. The cause of the poor, neglected by the natural-rights ideologists of the French Revolution, was now transformed by the organized working-class movement.

Karl Marx argued that the Rights of Man were the rights of egoistic man, separated from the community. The concept treated society as external to individuals and as a limit on their natural freedom. It purported to be universal, but in fact expressed the interests of the bourgeois class, and, by emphasizing the rights of individuals, concealed the structured inequalities of class-based societies. It assumed, further, that individuals were actual or potential enemies, which might be true under the conditions of capitalism, but was neither natural nor universal. It treated the pre-social, autonomous individual as natural, and political life as merely the means to protect the supposedly natural rights. This bourgeois conception of rights ignored the fundamental importance of labour, production and wealth to human well-being. Human emancipation, therefore, would be socio-economic (Waldron 1987: 126–32). Marx was unclear as to whether the Communist society would need no concept of rights or would eliminate the bourgeois concept of rights. This was to prove to be a serious defect in Marx’s theory when the twentieth century witnessed the development of strong Communist states with official Marxist ideologies and no commitment to individual rights. A neo-Lockean concern with the protection of individual rights from abuse of power by the state was to play an important role in the politics of actual Communist societies. Marx’s attitude to European imperialism and colonialism was ambivalent: on the one hand, he denounced their cruelties; on the other hand, he saw global capitalism as an inevitable stage on history’s journey to Communism (Paquette 2014).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Founding Fathers of sociology – Marx, Weber and Durkheim – were impressed by the massive social changes introduced by modern industrial capitalism, and sought to understand the larger historical forces that had brought them about. Individuals and their supposed natural rights dropped out of the picture. The first sociologists saw society as a natural entity to be understood scientifically, and not as an artificial creation to be shaped by ethical principles. If the concept of rights appeared in such analyses at all, it did so not as a fundamental philosophical category to guide ethical and political action, but rather as an ideological construct to be explained by social science. Rights survived in the US Constitution, and thinkers such as de Tocqueville, J. S. Mill and Weber worried about individual freedom in the age of large-scale, impersonal organization. The working-class and socialist movements nevertheless played a vital role in the struggle for economic and social rights.

The concept of individual rights survived in the late nineteenth century, but rights were defended, not as natural rights, but as conducive to the common good, either on Utilitarian or neo-Aristotelian grounds transmitted through the philosophy of Hegel. Certain practical political questions – such as slavery, minorities and colonial rule – were sometimes discussed in the language of the Rights of Man, and some predecessors of modern human-rights non-governmental organizations, such as the French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, were set up. Other social movements and developments – such as the campaign for the social and political rights of women, workers’ and socialist movements, and the development of humanitarian laws of war – laid important foundations for the future of human rights in two particular respects. Firstly, they brought to the foreground economic and social rights, although these had not been ignored in previous eras. Secondly, the international solidarity of NGOs was pioneered as technological advances made international travel and communication faster and easier.

The First World War was a humanitarian disaster, but it also advanced the causes of economic and social rights, the rights of women and minorities, and the right of national self-determination against imperialism. At the end of the war the League of Nations was established, and addressed questions of justice in the colonies, minorities, workers’ rights, slavery, the rights of women and children and the plight of refugees. The Covenant of the League made no mention of the Rights of Man. Japan proposed a clause upholding the principle of racial equality, but this was defeated on the initiative of the USA and the United Kingdom. The League of Nations turned out to be a practical failure. It took the horrors of Nazism to revive the concept of the Rights of Man as human rights.