The Right of Natural Persons to Self-Preservation

The individual right to self-preservation took centre stage in many fiery debates in early modern Europe. At a time when appealing to nature, reason, and natural rights became far more common, self-preservation often took priority. Self-preservation as a principle of nature, a duty, and a right, eventually coalesced into an individual right closely tied to the right of self-governance, rights of war, and the right to rebellion. Such a right often seems to rest on tenuous grounds, empirically and morally, and contains within it often fraught tensions. At the time when it was rising to prominence in both use and power in seventeenth-century Europe, many of the tensions inherent in such a right were laid bare in open political and legal debates. This chapter tracks some of the ways the right to self-preservation was weaponized and conceptualized at this time and how this right, so fundamental to many other rights in this volume, invites questions crucial to our understanding of the modern individual’s relationship to society and to the state. Namely (1) what is dangerous? (2) what makes a life worth living? and (3) where are the boundaries of the self? The right to self-preservation gives us a unique window into the early modern divides over how to conceive of the self and its place in the legitimation of the social and political order.