Edelstein on the Catholic roots of the "preservationist" concept of in/unalienable rights

Stanford University

     "In a superb, erudite piece of intellectual excavation, Edelstein argues persuasively that already in the late Middle Ages, Catholic theologians had established that humans possessed inalienable rights, and that these rights do not depend on belonging to a particular state.  In the sixteenth century, driven by the passions of religious warfare and the spectacle of Spanish conquests in the Americas, another series of writers added that, if necessary, rights could be defended by force, from beyond the boundaries of the state in question.  So already by 1572, a conception of human rights broadly similar to what exists today had taken shape. . . .
"Although the preservationist regime of rights had come into existence by the late sixteenth century, it did not immediately become dominant in the Western world.  To the contrary, many of the most sophisticated and influential writers of the day, [namely Hobbes and Locke,] associating it with the horrors of Reformation-era religious warfare, sought either to refute it or to establish the right to resist oppression on other, less volatile grounds. . . .
"When American and French revolutionaries declared that men (but not women) possessed inalienable, universal rights, they were [thus] not building on Hobbes and Locke.  They were reactivating a very different concept of rights that had arisen on the European continent two centuries earlier."

     David A. Bell, summarizing Dan Edelstein, On the spirit of rights (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2019), in "The many lives of liberalism," The New York review of books 66, no. 1 (January 17, 2019):  26 (24-27).