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natural rights

Source:
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
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natural rights, 

more commonly known as human rights, refers to inalienable rights possessed by persons as human beings, in their natural or pre-political condition. Though compatible with the advocacy of absolutist government, as in the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whereby natural rights are surrendered upon entering civil society, a more radical sense of natural rights, as those entitlements which could be appealed to by a people against an oppressive government, was instituted with the English Civil War of the 1640s and the *Glorious Revolution of 1688. This more radical interpretation, which found its most influential expression at the end of the seventeenth century in the writings of John *Locke, became the dominant theory of natural rights during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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