ABSTRACT
Rights remained principles of self-interest, the excesses of which could not be escaped without the injurious superimposition of sovereign power and authority, According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the failures of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke could be attributed to the simple fact that they got human nature wrong. Rousseau appears to build on and extend, Locke's idea of self-ownership, claiming that one can compassionately appropriate the actions and experiences of others as well, imputing them to oneself. Compassion became, for Rousseau, the natural substitute for morality and virtue in the natural man, something that produces a gentleness and concern where there is, strictly speaking, no natural obligation to come to the aid of any sufferer. It is this natural compassion that reinforces the natural sociability of natural right. Both Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte constructed an account that made rights the byproducts of reciprocal recognition.
