Politics Report - Citizenship Define CitizenshipCitizenship is the relationship between a person and the country they live in

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Caroline Hood

Politics Report – Citizenship

Define Citizenship

Citizenship is the relationship between a person and the  they live in and support, and in return receive protection from. A person is usually a  of the country they are born in, but in some situations you can apply to change your citizenship to another country.

Political Rights

Political rights mean equality before the law, universal suffrage, etc. — can only be the rights of abstract human beings, rights which abstract from the real differences in wealth, privilege, education, occupation, kinship etc.

Natural Rights

Natural rights are a political theory that maintains that an individual enters into society with certain basic rights and that no government can deny these rights. The modern idea of natural rights grew out of the ancient and medieval doctrines of  , i.e., the belief that people, as creatures of nature and God, should live their lives and organize their society on the basis of rules and precepts laid down by nature or God. With the growth of the idea of individualism, especially in the 17th cent., natural law doctrines were modified to stress the fact that individuals, because they are natural beings, have rights that cannot be violated by anyone or by any society. Perhaps the most famous formulation of this doctrine is found in the writings of John  . Locke assumed that humans were by nature rational and good, and that they carried into political society the same rights they had enjoyed in earlier stages of society, foremost among them being freedom of worship, the right to a voice in their own government, and the right of property. Jean Jacques  attempted to reconcile the natural rights of the individual with the need for social unity and cooperation through the idea of the  . The most important elaboration of the idea of natural rights came in the North American colonies, however, where the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and Thomas  made of the natural rights theory a powerful justification for revolution. The classic expressions of natural rights are the English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States (known as the Bill of Rights, 1791), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations (1948).

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Positive Rights

Since the concept of  limits the actions of the government, the only way to circumvent them is by adding new rights that are allegedly superior to the others. The concept of Positive Rights was developed. These new rights differ from the old rights. Instead of involving freedom from interference from others, these new rights demand goods and services.

The "positive" in positive rights refers to the fact that to satisfy these rights, other people must provide them. They require action from others, instead of inaction. A "right" to health care is such a right. In order to ...

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