Hohfeld’s Incidents — a right is a bundle

Wesley Hohfeld showed that “a right” is rarely one simple thing. A familiar right usually combines claim, liberty, power and immunity at once.

Hohfeld’s four incidents of a right

• Claim — another bears a matching duty
• Privilege / Liberty — the holder is under no duty
• Power — holder can alter legal relations, rights or duties
• Immunity — others lack the power to alter one’s legal position

Right to Property in Political Theory

Property is one of the most significant — and most contested — rights in liberal discourse.

The liberal foundation: Locke

• John Locke (Second Treatise): people convert common into private property by mixing their labour with it; every man has a “property” in his own “person”; property is tied to labour, improvement and liberty.
• Government cannot take property without consent — rulers “must not raise taxes on the property of the people, without the consent of the people.” If rulers destroy property through arbitrary power, people may resume their original liberty through rebellion.
• David Hume: property rules are evolved pre-legal conventions that gain legitimacy through mutual acknowledgement.

Socialist and Marxist critique

• Karl Marx: property is not a natural right — it determines the relations of production, becomes a means of exploitation and alienation, and divides society into classes.
• Social function of property: a legal and social institution; most modern constitutions (save communist ones) recognise private property, with a right not to be deprived except by due process; property helps realise housing, food and social security — and, because it has a social function, may be limited to correct injustice.

Assessment

With liberty it is easy to see when one person’s right blocks another’s; with property, limits are harder — it may be inherited, occupied by chance, taken by force or made by cooperative labour. Concentration breeds “haves” and “have-nots” and threatens fraternity. Property is vital to liberty and dignity, but inseparable from justice and redistribution.

Rights of Resistance & Revolution

If rights can be denied, may they be reclaimed by disobedience — or by revolution? The tradition answers yes, but on tight terms.

Civil disobedience — the remedial right within the order

“A public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of government.”

John Rawls

It is public, non-violent, conscientious and political; justified only against clear and substantial injustice, used after normal appeals fail, and open rather than covert or coercive. It is a remedial right within a generally legitimate constitutional order — not a licence for every grievance.

The right of revolution

A “remedial right only… understood as the right of persons subject to a political authority to defend themselves from serious injustices.”

Allen Buchanan

Allen Buchanan treats revolution as a last resort, conditional on serious injustice, proportionality, feasibility and the promise of a better, rights-protecting order — where lesser measures (international indictments, targeted sanctions) will not suffice.

The limits of resistance

• Expressive (critical theory): Robin Celikates and Seyla Benhabib stress that occupations and digital leaks can voice the excluded and expand the demos.
• Normative: for Rawls and Buchanan, lethal violence is justified only against massive rights violations; Philip Pettit ties resistance to severe domination that negates civic equality.
• Epistemic & institutional: Hannah Arendt warns that “Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning”; violence may destroy the very space of freedom it seeks to create, and without re-legalisation politics decays into the “rule of nobody.”

Assessment

Resistance is a safety valve against injustice; revolution is a morally hazardous remedy of last resort. Legitimate resistance must be public, proportionate, rights-oriented and institution-building.

Generations of Human Rights

Karel Vasak classified human rights into three generations; Louis B. Sohn added a fourth.

Vasak’s generations — rights widen with history. 1st · Blue (Civil & political · negative · freedom from the state) → 2nd · Red (Socio-economic & cultural · positive · the state must act) → 3rd · Green (Solidarity · collective · self-determination, development, peace, environment) → 4th · Sohn (Genome, bioethics, digital privacy, AI + vulnerable groups)

Criticism of the generational model

• Steven Jensen & Patrick Macklem: the model fails to capture the complexity of rights struggles. Maurice Cranston: “scarcity of resources means second and third generation of rights are no rights at all.”
• Charles Kessler: 2nd/3rd generation rights may cloak political goals. Friedrich Hayek: delivering them may justify a planned economy and centralisation that pulls power from citizens. Against them, Jeremy Waldron: they are the logical next step for realising first-generation rights.
• Balance: useful for classification, but no generation is superior — rights are indivisible and interdependent: civil liberty without socio-economic security is weak; welfare without civil freedom turns authoritarian.

Classification & the key instruments

Classification: classical rights (civil/political limits on state power) · fundamental rights (held paramount so they are not diluted as rights proliferate) · collective vs individual (most are individual; some can be exercised only by groups) · the first/second/third-generation historical development above.