Political Philosophy

Anarchical Fallacies

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Jeremy Bentham

1796

Bentham's trenchant critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written in response to the Revolution's theoretical foundations. He argues that the language of natural and inalienable rights is "nonsense upon stilts" — evocative rhetoric that conveys no determinate meaning and provides no guidance for legislation. For Bentham, rights exist only as creatures of law; pre-legal "natural rights" are a fiction that, when invoked to justify revolution, produces chaos rather than reform. The essay is the canonical Utilitarian response to natural-rights liberalism.