Abstract

Not everyone agreed with Barker when he wrote those words. Few students of the Politics would agree with him today. Disagreement comes from different sides. On one hand--the "rights" hand, one might call it--Karl Popper argued in 1945 in The Open Society and its Enemies that Aristotle's essentialism was less interesting than Platonism but equally congenial to modern totalitarianism. On the other hand--call it the "anti-rights" hand --scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre and the legal historian Michel Villey would have it that the whole modern conception of rights, especially human or natural rights, is a pernicious fabrication of the Enlightenment, with roots going back no further than the similarly pernicious nominalism of William of Ockham. As far as the current consensus is concerned, then, whether one favors rights or not, and whether one admires Aristotle or not, there are no rights--or at least no individual natural rights--in Aristotle.