rise up in arms. This was a problem because; The natural rights “Against which there can be no prescription; against these no agreements is binding” gave the revolutionaries the tools to destroy the very society that Burke believed afforded them with rights. In this way Burke thought the rights contained in the Declaration would lead to “the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.” Jeremy Bentham on natural rights The 18th-century Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham criticised the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in his text Anarchical Fallacies. He famously asserted that the concept of natural rights was “nonsense upon stilts”. Bentham criticised the Declaration both for the language that it adopted and the theories it posited, stating; “Look to the letter, you find nonsense; look beyond the letter, you find nothing.” One of the critiques Bentham levelled against the Declaration was its assertions of rights in the form of absolute and universal norms. He identified that absolute rights possessed by everyone equally are meaningless and undesirable. They lack meaning because if everyone has, for example, unbounded liberty, there is nothing precluding them from using that liberty to impinge on the liberty of another. In this way “human government and human laws” are required to give some bounds to rights in order for them to be realised. Even if advocates of absolute rights recognise this necessity, as the proponents of the Declaration did, Bentham argues that it is in vain. “It would be self-contradictory, because these rights are, in the same breath which their existence is declared, declared to be imprescriptible; and imprescriptible… means nothing unless it excludes the interference of the laws.” In addition to this contradiction, Bentham warned of the dangers of couching rights in absolute terms. A government that is able to protect every person's right absolutely and equally is a utopian aspiration, but the Declaration couches it as the conditions for its legitimacy. “Against every government which fails in any degree of fulfilling these expectations, then, it is the professed object of this manifesto to excite insurrection.” Bentham does not deny that there are some laws that are morally wrong; his uneasiness is in easily justifying a revolutionary call to arms – with the violence, chaos and destruction associated with it – based on a repugnant law. Of the theoretical faults, Bentham thought that natural rights were a construction