The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

66 The Essential Rothbard
Tierney has decisively brought into question the idea of
Strauss and [Michel] Villey of an antithesis between an
ancient Aristotelian doctrine of natural law and a modern
theory of subjective natural rights. 175
Tierney, one of the world’s foremost authorities on medieval
canon law, finds numerous uses of the language of individual rights
in the writings of twelfth-century Decretists such as Rufinus and
the “greatest of them all, Huguccio.” 176
Many canonists included in their lists of meanings a subjective
one that explained ius naturale as a faculty or power
inherent in human nature . . . from the beginning, the subjective
idea of natural right was not derived from Christian
revelation or from some all-embracing natural-law theory of
cosmic harmony but from an understanding of human nature
itself as rational, self-aware, and morally responsible. 177
As all readers of Rothbard know, the key principle of his ethics
is the axiom of self-ownership; and this too has medieval
antecedents. Tierney finds that “one of the most illustrious masters
of the University of Paris in the latter part of the thirteenth century,”
Henry of Ghent, had a firm grasp of this principle. 178 Henry
asked whether a criminal condemned to death had the right to flee
and argued that he did: “Only the criminal himself has a property
right in his own body or, as Henry put it, ‘only the soul under God
has property in the substance of the body’.” 179
175 Rothbard Papers; Modugno, ed, Diritto, natura e ragione, p. 15.
176 Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, p. 64. The Decretists were
commentators on the major compilation of canon law, the Decretum
Gratiani.
177 Ibid., p. 76.
178 Ibid., p. 83.
179 Ibid., p. 86.