ABSTRACT
The story of natural rights in the eighteenth century is largely a story about the political deployment of an idea by thinkers who took an increasingly sceptical attitude to its philosophical foundations. In Natural Rights Theories Richard Tuck has outlined various ways in which such a conventionalist defence of absolutism might be resisted. Parents seem to be natural rulers, and the subordination of children to their authority appears to be part of Gods plan for mankind. The strategy which became dominant, however, and which nourished the tradition of natural rights, drew neither on psychological impossibility nor on interpretative charity, but on the idea of certain duties imposed by natural law. Furthermore, Enlightenment anthropology did not stop at the discovery of moral dissensus. It embarked also on the project, which has dominated all subsequent study of human societies, of trying to understand local moralities as natural phenomena and to correlate different mores with the different conditions under which human beings lived.
