Some philosophers distinguish two types of rights, natural rights and legal rights.Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable. Natural law is the law of natural rights. Legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by a given legal system. The concept of positive law is related to the concept of legal rights.

The Age of Enlightenment was the intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries. The Enlightenment featured a range of social ideas centered on the value of knowledge learned by way of rationalism and of empiricism and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government and the formal separation of church and state.