Diritti / privilegi. Inseguendo un confine mobile

Autore: Giorgia Alessi
In: Genesis. I/2, 2002
doi:10.1400/78236
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Abstract

Rights and Privileges: The History of Shifting Meaning in Legal Language
This essay begins by examining the similar meanings of the words right, privilege, and liberty in the legal language of the late Middle Ages. As political and intellectual developments led to the modern notion of egalitarian citizenship based on individualism, right and privilege increasingly took on divergent connotations. This introduction traces that development and asks a final question: does the study of different legal cultures and traditions logically lead to extreme and perhaps dangerous relativism? Is it true that «The rightfulness of an act cannot be judged if not on the basis of the values of the societies which it refers to?».