In this chapter, we are concerned with ordinary hubris – what social and personality psychologists empirically study under the heading of self-enhancement. This umbrella term refers to both (a) the motive to augment or protect the positivity of the self, and (b) probable manifestations of that motive at a cognitive or behavioural level. We review five such manifestations: the better-than-average effect (regarding oneself as superior to others); the self-serving bias (taking credit for success but disavowing blame for failure); selective memory (forgetting one’s weaknesses but not one’s strengths); overclaiming (endorsing flattering falsehoods about oneself); and socially desirable responding (strategically acting to gain social approval). We also discuss the case of excessive self-enhancement: narcissism. This personality trait combines self-serving grandiosity with manipulative propensity. Narcissists irrationally over-exhibit all five key manifestations of self-enhancement but are likely to be over-represented among movers and shakers. We conclude with a nuanced consideration of self-enhancement’s costs and benefits.

This chapter seeks to introduce recent research on leadership hubris, particularly relating to political and business leaders. It offers an overview of key insights, concepts and theories suggesting three possible dimensions of the specific problem of leadership hubris and its consequences for leadership effectiveness. It also aims to highlight relationships and divergences between approaches and findings of classical scholars and of psychologists, neurologists and leadership researchers concerned with the experience and impact of modern, hubristic leadership. It aims to show how current understanding of hubris has developed from the ancient. While criminal charges may no longer be brought against those accused of hubris in their leadership roles, they may well be considered to be suffering from an acquired personality disorder. Alternatively, their dysfunctional leadership may be attributed to the negative consequences of a wider social process involving, in addition to the leaders themselves, a conducive context and followers rendered susceptible to such leadership by such processes of which both they and their leaders are victims.

During the period of Sasanian dominion (224–651 ce) the inhabitants of the Empire of Ērānšahr (“Realm of the Iranians”) were subject to a well-developed and efficient legal system, which was in force in all the provinces of the vast empire during the five centuries of this dynasty’s rule and remained relevant far into the Muslim era after the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. In the age that the chapter deals with, Iranian law had already developed across many centuries from its simple beginnings in a pastoral society in the first millennium bce, during which the first Zoroastrian precepts were formulated and customs established, to its most sophisticated known form in the legal system of the Sasanian state. Within this timespan, jurisprudence evolved into an advanced and complex discipline, which remained firmly based on Zoroastrian tenets, but became largely detached from theology particularly in the legal practice of the state courts in the Sasanian era.

If we expect that the world culture with the first written laws should give us the earliest instances of legal “rights,” we would be looking at Mesopotamia. At the outset, this looks promising, because the senses of legal and moral right pertaining in the relevant Sumerian and Akkadian terms have the same semantic basis as the Indo-European root which builds the English word “right”: Sum. si sa2, “to make straight, fair”; Akk. ešēru, “to go/be straight,” causative šutēšuru, “to provide justice.” Like Latin rectus, “ruled,” and Germanic riht, “just, good,” these Mesopotamian verbs married senses of normativity and fairness (whether in terms of justice, ethical correctness, or moral principle) to concepts of straightness and linearity. Conversely, any deviation from si sa2/ešēru implied straying from a straight path or from justice. So, we begin with the semantics in good order.

A study of the notion of rights in classical Greek thought naturally focuses on Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Plato’s ethics shows a much greater concern with people’s interests than with their rights. In Plato, too, these interests are identified with reference to the community as a whole; that is, it is the good of the community that comes first in order of justification. As Julia Annas remarks in her Introduction to Plato’s Republic, in Plato’s ideal city “all classes are protected in freely having and doing what is necessary for them best to fill their social role.” At the same time, Plato believes that interests justified in this way (that is, identified and determined with reference to their contribution to the common good) are people’s true interests: his politics and ethics are therefore paternalistic and illiberal. As such, they do not allow for a theory of subjective rights as morally or legally sanctioned entitlements that are concerned with the individual qua individual, independently of the contribution that they might make to the common good. Plato’s predecessors, for their part, had mainly focused on the relation between morality and self-interest and the potential conflict between the two.

The notion of right(s) is ubiquitous in Roman Republican writings and its meaning often ambiguous and varied; it includes the idea of justice, normative rules, as well as a wider legal order. Following the work of Michel Villey, who argued that the Romans did not have a concept of subjective rights, as this would have required associating the ideas of right and power, historians of political thought and philosophers of law have all agreed that the Romans did not have much (or anything) to contribute to the idea of subjective rights and focused on identifying its first developments in subsequent periods, ranging from the twelfth century down to the late medieval period.

Stephen Angle and Marina Svensson assert that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, there was not a Chinese word that translates the concept of “rights.” They hold that even though the classical and postclassical Chinese talked about “privileges and powers,” they didn’t have ideas of rights that correspond to the modern Western senses: namely, those that correspond to duties, protect the individual person, or provide “antimajoritarian trumps on the general interest.” Even though rights talk was also relatively new to the West then, Angle and Svensson claim that rights were founded on the historical Western understanding of persons as autonomous individuals. In contrast, they hold that the Chinese view persons as always already bound up in roles and relationships which, instead of developing into rights that correlate with duties as in the West, remains as talk about “reciprocal responsibilities” in their theorizing about ethics and politics.

In its opening clause, the preamble to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts the strong affinity between the concepts of human dignity and human rights. “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” the declaration grandly begins, “is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Preambles are repositories of lofty rhetoric, but they are also expressions of shared values and basic ideological assumptions. The expansive political claims of the UDHR find justification in the idea of human dignity. Moreover, the Declaration itself helped to cement the place of dignity in the modern discourse of rights, and the importance of dignity as a source of moral justification remains a lively theme in explorations of the origins and normative basis for human rights claims. In the words of Jeremy Waldron, for instance, “Dignity is intimately connected with the idea of rights – as the ground of rights, the content of certain rights, and perhaps even the form and structure of rights.”

In Latin ius (like droit in French, diritto in Italian, Recht in German) can mean a whole body of normative rules, a legal order, as well as “right,” in the many senses of the English word. Early in the last century, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld proposed that English speakers resolve the ambiguity about the meaning of “right,” at least in precise legal language, by using the word “right” only where there was a correlative “duty” in another or others. If there was no correlative duty, but simply an absence of right in someone else (a “no-right”), Hohfeld preferred to say that the subject had a “privilege.” Hohfeld also proposed four other “fundamental legal categories”: “power” (another word that is sometimes encompassed in “right”), “immunity” (also sometimes encompassed in “right”), “liability,” and “disability,” categories that referred to the subject’s ability or lack thereof to change the first set of categories.

In August 1989, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Le Monde published an interview with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In that interview Thatcher, in France at the time as an honored guest of French President François Mitterrand, asserted that claims that the notion of subjective rights originated with the French Revolution, and specifically with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 1789, are nonsense. The socialist French Prime Minister Michel Rocard criticized Thatcher vocally, and her arrival at the bicentennial celebrations was met with jeers, yet many historians today would agree with her, whatever their preferred origin point(s) for a concept of subjective rights. What is more controversial is Thatcher’s alternative account of the origins of the notion of subjective rights: to her, they had been invented by the Greeks, and were already foundational to Athenian democracy.

The late ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine (ca. 2nd–5th centuries ce) are properly included in a history of rights despite the absence from their literatures of a discrete term for “rights.” Nearly a century ago, Dr. Isaac Herzog introduced “rights” as among the “fundamental concepts” requiring examination early in the first volume of his The Main Institutions of Jewish Law, which surveys and analyzes Jewish law sources from the rabbinic period through early modernity. Herzog observes that “‘Right’ and its correlative ‘duty’ are fundamental concepts in law” without which “law would be unthinkable.” He draws inter alia on John Salmond in defining a “right” as “an interest recognised and protected by a rule of right” and “any interest respect for which is a duty and the disregard of which is a wrong.” By way of illustration, Herzog observes that if A owes money to B, then B has a right against A to recover the debt. Herzog proclaims it “self-evident” that “these elemental concepts are present in Jewish law” while observing that the “ancient sources” lack terms corresponding to English law’s “right” and “duty.”

It is common to read that the concept of rights did not exist in ancient times. The most influential proponent of this thesis in the past half-century or so may be Alasdair MacIntyre but he is hardly alone. In a more recent discussion, Tom Campbell says this: “Rights (as distinct from the more general ideas of right and wrong) were unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, although the idea developed in the course of medieval theorizing concerning Roman law.” A slightly more nuanced view is put forward by William Sweet: “The history of the ‘discourse’ of human rights is fairly well known. While the existence of ‘natural rights’ is implied in works of antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that we begin to see an acknowledgment of rights as distinct from ‘the right.’”

In terms of social and legal history, Ptolemaic Egypt is the best known of the Hellenistic kingdoms, as the dry sand conserved an abundance of papyri for centuries. Its multi-ethnic population and the combination of ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Greek cultural elements make it an even more interesting case study. A direct equivalent to the modern concept of rights probably did not exist in Ptolemaic Egypt, even if there is discussion around the terms used. Aspects of the concept of rights can be traced at different levels of intensity. Rights and duties in the sense of obligation deriving either from contract or violations of other persons or their belongings are found in hundreds of contracts, petitions, claims, or court proceedings in Greek as well as in Egyptian contexts. Beyond this two-person relationship, more abstract rights over things and persons are found relative to property, paternal authority, or slavery, which are all sometimes categorized as absolute rights today. On the other hand, to assume rights in the sense of liberties of an individual against the state or of legal power within the state is probably anachronistic.

The concept of rights as the bedrock of legal systems arose in modernity. This fact derives from a variety of contingent circumstances, some historical, others epistemological. Yet the building blocks from which the edifice of rights discourse is constructed were assembled and shaped in premodernity. The oldest strata in the quarry from which legal rights derive is surely classical, insights and postulates explored first by the Greeks beginning in the fifth century bce and incorporated into legal praxis through Roman law, particularly in the high imperial centuries. They were then kept alive and further developed in the late Middle Ages when the twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators and in turn the fourteenth-century nominalist William of Ockham first articulated most of the principles out of which the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics, seventeenth-century humanists, and eighteenth-century social contract theorists would develop full-fledged elaborations of rights-based law.

The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study while clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, Volume i of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.

Is there anything in the ancient world that deserves to be called a “right” in the subjective sense? The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stated quite apodictically that “there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400,” concluding from this that even if there were such rights, “no one could have known that there were.” Until relatively recently, historians would have agreed with MacIntyre. The prevailing view was that in antiquity we look in vain for what has come to be called subjective rights – that neither the concept of rights nor the word “right” could be encountered in the ancient world in its subjective sense.

The Hebrew Bible with its strident championing of the oppressed is frequently associated with the development of human rights. Renowned for its bold account of the emancipation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, its impact on the later beliefs in freedom and human dignity is immense. Yet is it appropriate to associate its laws with the origin of this principle, since the term itself (זכויות אדם in Hebrew) is absent in the Pentateuch – and where it is anachronistic to impose this post-Enlightenment concept on these ancient sources?