Pravica do življenja

The right to existence is a notion eclipsed by the rise of liberalism in the nineteenth century. In response to genocide as the defining moment of our time, the concept of the right to existence is worth rediscovering and reconsidering. One of its main advocates during the French Revolution was Maximilien Robespierre. This booklet brings a Slovenian translation of three of his speeches that touch upon the right to existence, and a sizable foreword by Tomaž Mastnak that places them in historical context. The French debates about the right to existence revolved around the liberalization of grain trade. The Enlightenment economic philosophers, advocates of a total freedom of trade and unlimited private property rights, had royal support in their attack on the right to existence and on the state administrative system that ensured it; on the opposite side, the right to existence was defended by state officials, parliaments, and rural and urban popular masses. Their resistance to liberalization rested on the popular moral economy that was being replaced by political economy as the new science of governing society.