Calvin, Calvinism, and Rights

A close associate (thanks, Jeremy) referred this link to me http://www.calvin.edu/january/2009/witte.htm. It’s an hour-long lecture by John Witte, professor of law at Emory Law School in Atlanta. Two years ago Witte published The Reformation of Rights (Cambridge 2007) in which he argued that John Calvin and subsequent Calvinism were the grandfather and father of the modern understanding of human rights. Don’t let the length of his talk put you off, Witte is an extraordinarily engaging lecturer. The best parts of his comments concern the work of Geneva’s Consistory, its highest ecclesiastical court. Unlike the Lutheran reformation, the Calvinists had a high regard for the law within and without the Church (no law-grace dichotomy for Calvin). The Consistory dealt with all sorts of matters (including marriage, family, and sex), resolving most without recourse to the civil law system but referring the recalcitrant to the magistrate and his power of the sword.

However, Witte’s fundamental thesis about Calvin’s place in the history of rights seems simultaneously anachronistic and Whiggish. While Witte admits that Calvin’s understanding of rights was localized (and not universal) and theologically, indeed, scripturally grounded, his paean of praise suggests a closer connection between early-modern and post-modern rights talk than I believe a careful examination will bear. Witte’s discussion of the tight Calvinistic nexus between rights and duties (particularly early modern Calvinism’s identification of rights as means by which to perform duties) is so different from the modern conception of rights as markers of zones of personal autonomy as to call his thesis into question.

Witte’s lecture (and book) also suggests that Calvin’s discussion of rights and early modern Calvinism’s expansion of the scope of rights was sui generis, a rupture with the medieval past and without parallel in the contemporary European context. In fact, a number of Catholic legal scholars were actively developing the concept of natural rights during the 15th and 16th centuries. See, e.g., Domenicus Soto and Tomasso di Vio. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice (Princeton 2008) and James Gordley, Foundations of Private Law (OUP 2006).

The popular nature of a public lecture, the occasion of his address (“The January Series” at Calvin College, this year honoring the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth), and Witte’s irenic nature all contribute to what I think is an overestimation of Calvin’s place in the story of rights in the Western tradition. The subsequent efforts of Calvinists in the Dutch Republic, England, and New England bear up much better as historical sources for human rights but Witte’s classification of the Unitarian John Adams (and even, IMHO, the Separatist John Milton) as a Calvinist undercuts even this argument.

Nonetheless, I heartedly recommend taking an hour to listen to a master of legal and cultural history at his best