ABSTRACT
The modern subject with his rights emerged after the revolutions of the eighteenth century. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights repeats the French statement of equal freedom but has no place for the right to resistance. Right derives from the state and belongs to law, even in their most odious versions. The attack on the right to revolution and its rejection by legal positivism led to its deletion from the legal archive in the relative prosperity after the Second World War. The right to resistance presumes that a law or ideal exists higher than state law demanding its total or partial repeal. For contemporary liberals, the state’s most important duty is to protect individual rights. The right to insubordination, turning the city against itself, is the ‘true right to rights, a kind of right to law’. The right to resistance, like all proper rights, is both real and ideal.
