American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia – Natural LawISI’s First Principles Web Journal has posted Russell Hittinger’s entry on Natural Law in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia: “Among conservatives, nothing discredited theories of natural rights more than the French Revolution, in which appeals to the ‘rights of man’ were used to overthrow the social, political, and ecclesiastical orders. Both Jeremy Bentham’s positivism and Edmund Burke’s defense of custom and tradition represented reactions to the revolutionary effects of natural-rights theories on the Continent. The waning of natural-law jurisprudence in the English tradition was due in large part to the revulsion caused by the French experiment.”
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