<P> In the German Enlightenment, Hegel gave a highly developed treatment of this inalienability argument . Like Hutcheson, Hegel based the theory of inalienable rights on the de facto inalienability of those aspects of personhood that distinguish persons from things . A thing, like a piece of property, can in fact be transferred from one person to another . According to Hegel, the same would not apply to those aspects that make one a person: </P> <P> The right to what is in essence inalienable is imprescriptible, since the act whereby I take possession of my personality, of my substantive essence, and make myself a responsible being, capable of possessing rights and with a moral and religious life, takes away from these characteristics of mine just that externality which alone made them capable of passing into the possession of someone else . When I have thus annulled their externality, I cannot lose them through lapse of time or from any other reason drawn from my prior consent or willingness to alienate them . </P> <P> In discussion of social contract theory, "inalienable rights" were said to be those rights that could not be surrendered by citizens to the sovereign . Such rights were thought to be natural rights, independent of positive law . Some social contract theorists reasoned, however, that in the natural state only the strongest could benefit from their rights . Thus, people form an implicit social contract, ceding their natural rights to the authority to protect the people from abuse, and living henceforth under the legal rights of that authority . </P> <P> Many historical apologies for slavery and illiberal government were based on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts to alienate any "natural rights" to freedom and self - determination . The de facto inalienability arguments of Hutcheson and his predecessors provided the basis for the anti-slavery movement to argue not simply against involuntary slavery but against any explicit or implied contractual forms of slavery . Any contract that tried to legally alienate such a right would be inherently invalid . Similarly, the argument was used by the democratic movement to argue against any explicit or implied social contracts of subjection (pactum subjectionis) by which a people would supposedly alienate their right of self - government to a sovereign as, for example, in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes . According to Ernst Cassirer, </P>

The philosopher who argued that a natural law guaranteed every person certain inalienable rights was