They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence,--rights which are absolutely repugnant to it?
From his critique of the French Revolution, Burke questions how natural rights can be claimed if they contradict the very existence of civil society.
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More from Edmund Burke
A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter so capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed.
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.
They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
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