Book contents
- the cambridge history of Rights
- The Cambridge History of Rights
- The Cambridge History of Rights
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors to Volume I
- General Introduction
- Introduction to Volume I
- 1 To Claim to Protect Claims
- 2 The Individual and the Communal
- 3 Human Rights in the Hebrew Bible?
- 4 Greek Subjective Rights?
- 5 Aristotle on Subjective Rights
- 6 Do Rights Exist in Hellenistic Philosophy?
- 7 Rights in Ptolemaic Egypt
- 8 Rights in Roman Republican Thought
- 9 Ius in the Subjective Sense in Classical Roman Law
- 10 Rights and Dignity in Late Ancient Thought
- 11 Rights in Late Ancient Law?
- 12 Rabbinic Judaism
- 13 Sasanian Law
- Index
- References
4 - Greek Subjective Rights?
Justice, Legal Discourse, and Legal Institutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2026
Book contents
- the cambridge history of Rights
- The Cambridge History of Rights
- The Cambridge History of Rights
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors to Volume I
- General Introduction
- Introduction to Volume I
- 1 To Claim to Protect Claims
- 2 The Individual and the Communal
- 3 Human Rights in the Hebrew Bible?
- 4 Greek Subjective Rights?
- 5 Aristotle on Subjective Rights
- 6 Do Rights Exist in Hellenistic Philosophy?
- 7 Rights in Ptolemaic Egypt
- 8 Rights in Roman Republican Thought
- 9 Ius in the Subjective Sense in Classical Roman Law
- 10 Rights and Dignity in Late Ancient Thought
- 11 Rights in Late Ancient Law?
- 12 Rabbinic Judaism
- 13 Sasanian Law
- Index
- References
Summary
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.
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- The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 92 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
Further Reading
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