Carl Friedrich Bahrdt and the idea of a human right to sexual satisfaction

Authors

  • John Christian Laursen

Keywords:

Human rights, sexual satisfaction, divorce, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, innovation

Abstract

In 1792 philosopher and public intellectual Carl Friedrich Bahrdt demanded a right to sexual satisfaction, using the term still used today in German for a human right: Menschenrecht. The purpose of the demand was to justify divorce rights and limit church and state interference with private life. Bahrdt was in a position to draw on arguments from natural law, libertinism and Spinozism, and Protestant Aristotelianism, but he took them further by articulating the right to divorce as an issue of sexual satisfaction. It may have been his personal life that gave him the incentive to push for this right. At the time, there was little or no follow-up, yet today a number of intellectuals have taken the right for granted, raising questions of prematurity in the history of political ideas. At the same time, the human rights community has not made an issue of this right, raising issues of the insulation of fields from each other.

Issue

Section

ARTICLES