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THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTS

inhuman distortion and incorporates it into the phenomenal stock of knowledge, of in-
sight, and of practical recognition. For this reason, it is anything but a coincidence that
both declarations of human rights count the right to property among the inalienable
fundamental rights: knowledge is a possession, a possible or real form of property,
founded in consciousness as the inalienable locus of convergence of the conscious and of
life, and privileged as property in its extreme ideality. The Declaration of 1789 lists it in
second place, directly after the right to freedom: ‘‘These rights are liberty, property, secur-
ity, and resistance to oppression’’ (article 2). The UN declaration of 1948 proclaims in
article 17 more cautiously, yet no less categorically, that ‘‘Everyone has the right to own
property alone as well as in association with others.’’ This right to property forms a
systematic continuity with the right to security and freedom, for security means apersev-
eratio in se ipsum, while freedom is persistently determined as a limit against others, of
which property figures as the material representation: ‘‘Liberty consists in the freedom to
do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each
man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the
enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law’’—thus article
4 of the French Declaration of 1789. Along the same lines, Kant writes in his essay of
September 1793 ‘‘On the Common Saying: ‘That May be Correct in Theory, but It Is
of No Use in Practice’ ’’ that ‘‘all right consists merely in the limitation of the freedom of
every other to the condition that it can coexist with my freedom in accordance with a
universal law’’ (A239). Freedom, defined as a ‘‘choice limiting one another (which is
called the civil condition)’’ and which characterizes ‘‘the rightful condition (status iuridi-
cus) as such’’ (A240), is freedom only within its limitations with regard to the freedom of
others. In his critique of the American and French human rights declarations in ‘‘On the
Jewish Question,’’ Marx accuses this egologically determined freedom of being the free-
dom of isolated social atoms and of blocking unlimited social freedom. Besides human
rights declarations, Marx’s analysis is also directed at John Locke’s anthropological theory
of property in theSecond Treatise of Governmentof 1689, which had laid the groundwork
for those declarations during the previous century. In theTreatise, Locke declares the
purpose of all social compacts to be the ‘‘preservation of property’’ (§124) and further
defines this ‘‘property’’ as ‘‘their lives, liberties, and estates’’ (§123). Since Locke identifies
not just material goods and individual liberties but also life itself as ‘‘property,’’ the
grounding for all right to property must itself be an inalienable property, namely, the
property of one’s own person: ‘‘every Man has aPropertyin his ownPerson. This no Body
has any right to but himself ’’ (§27). The right to one’s own person secures this person
only as a property. Correspondingly, the right to freedom secures freedom only as a
property, which stands in competition with other properties and turns thestatus iuridicus
into a permanent condition of civil war, injuring all freedoms. The basic rights that are
supposed to be the essential rights of man are national and international rights of civil
war. Because they determine man in hishumanitasas man-against-other-men and fur-

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