The Darker Side of Rights in Global Intellectual History: An Ambivalent Case of Franciscan Poverty

Abstract

This chapter argues that the history of the Franciscan Order can provide an alternative perspective on the darker side of rights which goes beyond the critiques already established by postcolonial studies.It uses the methodologies of global intellectual history to question the boundaries of the contextual analysis of concepts. Postcolonial critiques of the darker side of rights have focused upon the entanglement between rights and colonialism that developed from the sixteenth-century extra-European conquests. By focusing on the disputes about the legal and theological permissibility of Franciscan poverty in the medieval period, we see that discourses of rights were already entangled with colonial processes prior to extra-European conquests. In trying to theorize an ideological position of poverty, Franciscans had an ambivalent role in this history as they contributed to the development of rights by criticizing increasingly legal understandings of rights and were critics of the way in which this restricted other ways that the poor could legitimately use to acquire the things of necessity.