The 1789 Declaration of Rights: Philosophy’s Compromise with Power
Adopted 235 years ago this August, this landmark document reveals how revolutionary ideals get diluted when they collide with real-world power.
On 27 August 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a text whose core ideas still shape modern national constitutions and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unlike most legislation, it was directly derived from philosophical discourse, a rare, historic transition from abstract theory to enforceable law that sets it apart from nearly all other legal texts in human history.
But that transition required deep compromise. The Declaration’s title itself hints at its limits: it granted rights to “men and citizens,” explicitly excluding women and enslaved people, even as Article I claimed all men are born free and equal in rights. “Rubber band” clauses further weakened its bite: Article I allowed social distinctions “only on the common good,” a loophole that could justify slavery, gender discrimination or caste systems if framed as beneficial to society. Article X protected free expression and religious belief only if they did not “trouble public order,” letting ordinary laws override the very rights the Declaration was meant to enshrine as superior to government policy, turning the document into a suggestion rather than a binding framework.
These contradictions sparked fierce critiques from thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, the British founder of utilitarianism. He argued rights are not inherent to our biology as homo sapiens, but granted by legal systems. If rights were truly natural, he noted, every human across all history, from ancient Mesopotamians to Indigenous Australians to modern teenagers, would have held identical rights, a claim plainly contradicted by historical reality. This raises pressing modern questions: if superintelligent AI surpasses human cognitive capacity, would it be denied rights solely because it is not biologically human?
For all its flaws, the 1789 Declaration was a pivotal first step toward universal human rights. It was perverted from its inception to justify the very inequalities it opposed, yet it proved that even the loftiest philosophical ideals can be codified into law. Even an imperfect declaration of rights, as we have seen over two centuries of progress and backsliding, is far better than none at all.
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