Abstract
The opposition between the Ancients and the Moderns is often criticized. If there is anything like this, one may find it in the opposition of natural rights. In classical natural right, the nature is an essence to be realized; it is an aim, not a presuppose of society. On the contrary, in early modern natural right, nature is a series of subjective rights attached to the person.
But if these rights exist before society, this does not mean they disappear with it: the citizens may suspend or limit the use of some rights; they will not relinquish them to the sovereign. What I would like to show is that these subjective natural rights remain central in civil society. Modern natural right is very diverse: what is understood as subjective rights remain very different from one author to another. I will here present Hobbes and Locke's anthropologies, often considered to open the two main directions of modern natural right: on Hobbes' side, positivism, on Locke's side, modern jusnaturalism. One may consider Hobbes' man a very cynical or at least pessimistic anthropology. Everyone heard of man being wolf to man, homo homini lupus, as said in De Cive. But actually, Hobbes' description of man, in the first part of Leviathan, goes far beyond that.
