To begin with, the rights of man were officially consecrated by
the Americans and the French at the end of the eighteenth
century. These rights, which did in fact open the era of modern
politics, nevertheless remain difficult to interpret. Jacques
Maritain, for example, or John Finnis see in them a progress in
recognition and understanding of the natural law—modern rights
prolonging classical natural law. Others, men like Leo Strauss
or Ernest Fortin, claim that these modern natural rights
represent a fundamental rupture with the tradition of classical
natural law. The difficulty here is clearly related to the
equivocal, or downright indeterminate, use of terms. The
eighteenth-century texts declare that men are endowed with equal
rights and an equal right to liberty. In France, this
formulation did, to be sure, sound the deathknell of the ancien
regime, but the question remains of how to interpret such a
formulation from the perspective of the history of natural
right. In schematic terms, one can sketch two c