From Natural Rights to the Nature of Rights: On Rousseau’s Theory of Property

What is the ‘nature’ of the right to private property? Rousseau offers a surprising response. Where the dominant, Lockean imaginary of natural property rights takes their original, pre-political givenness within human reason as grounding for their inviolability, Rousseau asserts that ‘nature’ itself provides a critical and normative standard for evaluating legal property rights. In this article, I analyse Rousseau’s various models of nature in order to reveal the distinctive way in which nature operates as a normative standard across his work, uniting what otherwise might seem like disparate and contradictory arguments about property rights into a coherent account. I argue that private property is not a natural right for Rousseau; instead, it is a right that must be made natural .