This file is a single argumentative essay in legal and political philosophy, originally published in The Freeman in 1964. Hazlitt’s central claim is that “rights” cannot be understood as free-floating moral wishes: the concept begins in law, and even when extended to natural or moral rights it must retain the legal structure of reciprocal duties.
Law and Right are correlative terms.
Hazlitt opens by grounding rights in a social and juridical order. A right is not merely something desirable; it is a protected sphere of action assigned to a person and imposed as a limit on others. This is why he insists that the language of rights must always be two-sided: my claim entails another person’s obligation.
A legal right for me implies a legal duty of others not to interfere with my free exercise of it.
From this premise, Hazlitt rejects the popular opposition between “property rights” and “human rights.” Property rights are not rights of things against people, but rights of persons against other persons concerning things. His conceptual move is to translate all rights-talk into relations among persons: claims, duties, forbearance, enforcement, and social coordination.
The essay then turns to constitutional guarantees, especially the American Bill of Rights, as a historical example of rights made explicit against government power. Hazlitt treats these guarantees as protections against arbitrary coercion: speech, worship, due process, security against unreasonable search, jury trial, compensation for takings, and related limits on state action. This section establishes the practical model for the rest of the essay: rights function as principled boundaries within which social cooperation becomes possible.
Hazlitt next addresses natural rights. He is sympathetic to the historical role of the doctrine but wary of its metaphysical rhetoric.
The term Natural Rights, like the term Natural Law, is in some respects unfortunate.
For Hazlitt, natural rights should not be treated as mystical entities existing outside human judgment. They are better understood as ideal legal rights—rights that persons ought to enjoy under a just order. This preserves the reforming power of natural-rights language without detaching it from institutional and moral responsibility.
If we abandon this two-sided concept the term right becomes a mere rhetorical flourish without definite meaning.
The sharpest polemical section attacks “pseudo-rights.” Hazlitt distinguishes genuine liberties, such as freedom of speech and worship, from welfare claims framed as rights. Roosevelt’s “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear,” and the United Nations’ declarations of rights to paid leisure or holidays, are criticized not because the goods are undesirable, but because they obscure who is obliged to provide them and by what title.
What makes them pseudo-rights is that they imply that it is somebody else’s obligation to supply those things.
This is the essay’s enduring relevance: Hazlitt anticipates later debates over rights inflation, social rights, and the distinction between negative liberties and positive claims. He does not deny that poverty, fear, education, or employment are morally significant; he denies that every humane aspiration can coherently be made a right without specifying duties, agents, limits, and conflicts.
In the final movement, Hazlitt complicates any simple libertarian absolutism. Rights are not always obvious, simple, or exceptionless.
Natural rights or moral rights are not always self-evident, are not necessarily simple, and are seldom if ever absolute.
He discusses conflicts among rights, limits on speech, and the inadequacy of reducing all rights to “equality of consideration.” Against both vague humanitarian rhetoric and purely abstract moral formulae, he defends the disciplined reasoning of law, which develops rights through both principle and experience.
The law is the product of logic and reason brought to bear on experience.
Hazlitt concludes with a rule-utilitarian foundation. Rights are inviolable within their proper limits, not because they descend mystically from nature, but because social peace depends on principled adherence to them. His final conceptual synthesis is legal, moral, and consequentialist at once: rights are moral boundaries justified by their indispensable role in sustaining ordered liberty.
Only by the most scrupulous respect for each other’s imprescriptible rights can we maximize social peace, order, and cooperation.
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