INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN MODERN LIBERAL THOUGHT: A REALIST ACCOUNT

This is a realist account of modern (post-Reformation) liberal doctrines of individual rights in Anglo-American political theory. These doctrines are traced through four phases: innovative, classical, neo-classical and Keynesian. These categories are argued to capture the most significant "moments" in the evolution of liberal conceptions of individual rights, but there is no claim to historical comprehensiveness.;After an informal introduction, the realist method employed in the body of the dissertation is defended in chapter two. Following Quentin Skinner and others who claim that the history of political theory can usefully be studied as the history of ideologies, it is argued that this requires different methods than those which he advocates. Instead a critical anthropology, geared to explaining the causal roles of political ideas in the reproduction of the social world, is required. Turning to the subject of investigation in chapter three, it is claimed that the liberal view of rights is an ensemble or related doctrines, beliefs and assumptions about the natures of persons, value, legitimacy and ends. The relations between these are complex, have changed over time, and are better understood by reference to Quine's account of belief systems as conservative adaptive mechanisms than conventional notions of consistency. In chapters four through seven this internally complex set of evolving doctrines is traced through the four moments mentioned, via case studies of the accounts of rights in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Nozick and Rawls from the realist point of view. Each chapter is divided into an "internal" discussion of the argument within its own terms of reference, and an "external" examination of its broader consequences in the evolving liberal tradition. In contrast to Macpherson and others, for whom modernity is characterized by a single "unit idea," namely "possessive individualism," it is contended that the liberal view of rights, while functional to capitalist markets, has evolved with the changing needs of those markets and with changing liberal assumptions about the driving causal mechanisms of those markets. A final chapter reconsiders the senses in which it is useful to consider political theory as ideological, and concludes with a critique of the deontological turn in contemporary liberal theory.