Universal Social Right
Foreword
Universal Social Right is a transitional book, a bridge allowing the reader to move from a study of the basic elements of right in individuals to consideration of the origin and development of rights within the social context. In the Introduction Rosmini admirably sums up what has already been achieved, and clearly indicates what remains to be accomplished. We need not repeat that summary here, nor review the difficulties inherent in the book itself. Instead, we should confront the problems posed by attitudes formed in the century and a half that has elapsed since Rosmini wrote - attitudes, positive and negative, that inevitably influence our approach to the question of social right(s).
Positively, interest has gradually come to focus with great intensity upon individual rights; the value of 'person' has been appreciated at an ever deeper level. The amorphous mass of humanity has been replaced by persons with names. Even the possibility of civil litigation, limited though it is for many people, has increased in a way that would have been impossible to visualise even fifty years ago. This possibility is a genuine sign of the growing esteem that we feel for personal dignity and the assertion of individual rights. The obstacles placed to such development by totalitarian States has not been sufficient to thwart it, nor has the modern practice of considering rights as though the State created them been capable of destroying their validity.
But while consciousness of personal dignity has increased and the worth attached to individual rights has increased, there has been a persistent erosion of the value of social activity as a necessary means to heightened personal attainment. To a great extent, individuality has given way to individualism. This is the case with every kind of society, even those which, superficially at least, seemed to pertain to the nature of things. Religious and family society are two obvious examples. Indeed the very nature of society appears to have been forgotten and its place usurped by the ubiquitous `community', so often used as a cover for merely sectional interest or geographic location to the detriment of genuine union of minds and wills devoted to a common attainment and bound by common laws.
Is it possible for persons to develop outside society? Is it possible for individuals to achieve true humanity without reference to society and irrespective of the duties and rights inherent in every society? That is the true question facing us as we confront this third volume of The Philosophy of Right. In other words, can human beings forge truly human lives for themselves without recognising their essential bonds with others, and without contracting new bonds through the instinctive urge that rightly seeks to unite them with every one of their fellows? If they cannot, understanding of the basic principles of social right will undoubtedly claim a place in the general treatise on rights; if they can, nothing more need be said about social right. We should realise, however, that the result of denying a place to social right in theory and practice has dire results. It diminishes capacity for appreciating the societies in which we live and to which we owe so much, encourages irresponsibility about the societies to which we actually belong and destroys the rational foundation on which we can re-build the fabric of society after its destruction at our own hands.
DENIS CLEARY
TERENCE WATSON
Durham,
June, 1995