IntroductionDan Edelstein’s On the Spirit of Rights proposes an insight into the multi-faceted “rights talk” that made the drafting of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen possible at the end of the eighteenth century.The American and French declarations declared inalienable natural rights and set the conditions for their “preservation” in political societies. Edelstein contrasts this position with two other ways of think...