Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/359

Rh which resulted from the breakdown of the unifying and universal authorities of the Middle Ages, the church and the empire, the Germanists overthrew the idea of the binding authority of the Roman law in modern Europe. Accordingly it became necessary to find new bases for legal and political authority, and those bases were found in reason and in contract, or the consent and agreement of the individual.

REASON AND NATURAL RIGHTS

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reason was made the measure of all obligation. Seventeenth-century legal and political philosophers considered that law existed in order to produce conformity to the nature of rational creatures. In practice, however, though they had broken with authority as such, they accepted the Roman law as embodied reason and essayed very little that did not have authority behind it. In consequence the Roman maxim—not to injure another and to give to everyone his own—was taken to express the nature of rational creatures, and respect for personality and respect for acquired rights remained the two cardinal principles of justice. But these principles raised two obvious questions: (1) What is there in personality that makes aggression an injury, and (2) what is it that makes anything one's own? The answer was sought in a theory of natural rights, or of certain qualities inherent in individual human beings and demonstrated by reason to which society, state, and law were bound to give effect. According to this theory, justice is the maximum of individual self-assertion; it is the function of the state and of the law to make it possible for the individual to act freely. Hence the sphere of law is limited to the minimum of restraint and coercion necessary to allow the maximum of self-assertion by each, limited by the like self-assertion by all. This purely individualist theory of justice culminated in the eighteenth century in the Declarations of the Rights of Man and Bills of Rights which are so characteristic of that time.

At the close of the eighteenth century the foundations of the seventeenth and eighteenth century theory were shattered by