This chapter proposes an alternative to the more economically driven historiography on French Enlightenment rights talk, by highlighting the role of philosophers, most notably Locke and Rousseau. It was their insistence on the inalienability of liberty that defined the philosophical discourse of rights in the eighteenth century. Locke repudiated the standard argument by natural lawyers (from Grotius to Pufendorf) that we could alienate our freedom, either by selling ourselves into slavery or subjecting ourselves to an absolutist sovereign. In both of these cases, we violate our right to self-preservation, which as a dictate of natural law is sacrosanct. Montesquieu similarly rejected Roman arguments for slavery in the name of self-preservation. And Rousseau insisted on the inalienability of liberty, through an operation (the social contract) that transforms natural liberty into political freedom. These arguments, too, informed the revolutionary understanding of human rights.

This chapter concentrates on the pivotal figure of Jean Barbeyrac, translator extraordinaire of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland, and others. A French Huguenot refugee, Barbeyrac introduced the great Protestant natural law treatises to a French (and ultimately English) audience. But Barbeyrac was much more than a translator. He recast earlier natural law theories around individual conscience and made subjective right the foundation for society and politics. Where Grotius and Pufendorf had conceived of permission or “natural liberty” as the freedom to do whatever the law did not forbid (and thus, not really a right), Barbeyrac insisted a contrario that both natural and civil law tacitly determined – and thus legalized – what was permissible for subjects to do. For Barbeyrac, rights thus took precedence over duties, though only because every action had been made permissible by God. He extended this argument to property, which originated from a God-given natural right to first possession.

Pufendorf’s reception and impact are not without paradox. Together with Grotius his name became a byword for natural law in his lifetime and has remained so. He was the key figure in the institutionalisation of natural law as an academic subject with wide-ranging extra-academic effect. Yet, his views were so widely and deeply contested from their publication that their original meaning and function mostly were lost sight of. Consequently, he has been subjected to a range of teleological interpretations that have persisted into contemporary scholarship, the most prominent being to see him as a proto-Enlightenment theorist of sociability and stadial history. His broad basis in erudite humanist scholarship was lost sight of, his ideas on constitutional law, ecclesiology and theology, and historiography being parcelled up along disciplinary lines. The effect was a narrowing of his legacy and with it the discipline of natural law in both moral philosophy and jurisprudence. This was despite his main commentator, Barbeyrac, himself being one of the last humanist scholars in natural law. The chapter discusses a range of the contestations about Pufendorf, including the remarkable contribution of Samuel Cocceji.