The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

Significance of the United Kingdom's Contribution 39
background, which itself is modified with shifts of meaning in the
course of usage. Texts by thinkers (writers) have consequences for
the institutional language in which their acts of writing are
performed, injecting new words, facts, perceptions and rules of the
game. Texts (that is the writings of thinkers) are acts by their authors
and thus historical events, translated and re-interpreted by subsequent
readers, and particular actions in long processes.
See also J. G. A Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on
Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the 18th Century (Cambridge
University Press, 1985), Chaps. 1 and 2. For a simpler account see J.
G. A. Pocock, "Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political
Thought" in Politics of Discourse, Kevin Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker
ed., (University of California Press, London, 1987), pp. 21-34. In his
Politics, Language and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History,
(Methuen, London, 1972), Pocock gives examples which will strike a
note with non-theory oriented lawyers. He shows that Edmund
Burke was first to point out the historical significance of the fact that
the English talked about their liberties in the common law language
of real property and that John Locke was talking in the language of
natural jurisprudence.
2 The Estates-General's Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen of August 1789 (henceforth the Rights of Man) was preceded
by Bills of Rights in Virginia and other British American colonies.
From the mid-17th century, American colonial assemblies passed
such Bills. For example, in October 1683, the people of New York
met in assembly with their first action being a claim to the rights of
Englishmen in a "Charter of Franchises and Privileges." The Estates-
General's drafting Committee for the Rights of Man had studied the
earlier American models and members like the Abbe Sieyes had for
over a decade discussed the American constitutions. Lafayette's own
draft Declaration had been vetted by Thomas Jefferson. During the
1989 bi-centenary celebrations one could easily have been forgiven
for believing that the rights of man were invented in France.
3 De Legibus el Consuetudinibus Angliae, a compilation by many, came
into Bracton's hands in the 1230's and was published about 1250.
Bracton's views on the limits of kingship influenced Hobbes, Firmer,
Algernon Sidney, Locke and generations of lawyers and judges.
Claude de Seyssel (14507-1520), theorist of French constitutionalism,
used Bracton's bridle metaphor in his theory of the three bridles. His
French La Grand Monarchie de Trance (1519) described la religion, la
justice (the Higher Courts or Parlements) and la police (the body of
the people well-ordered in three estates and under certain
conditions) as complex legal and institutional constraints resulting in
a flexible and a durable constitution.