ABSTRACT
The development of rights theory after Friedrich Hegel actually began in his own era, and as a reaction, at least in part, against his metaphysically based rights theory. Hegel's concerns regarding the terrors of absolute freedom did nothing to undermine his support for the French Revolution. What, more than anything else, produced the post-ontological transformation of rights theory in the nineteenth century beyond the Historical School's rhapsodic vision of rights created in and through the historically evolving national consciousness was the gradually increasing influence of empiricist epistemology, made prominent in the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume. Empiricist epistemology grew out of a desire to rid the world of all the forces of confusion created and sustained by commitment to abstruse meta-physics. The conceptual backdrop of utilitarian political theory is the idea that individual liberties and the general welfare stand in a reciprocally related dependency, one is always the precondition of the other.
