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Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: Progress

The Right to Leave Any Country - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Winter 1981, vol. 4, No. 4 [1981]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


The Right to Leave Any Country

Frederick G. Whelan

  • University of Pittsburgh

“Citizenship and the Right to Leave.” American Political Science Review 75(September 1981):636–653.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) proclaimed among “human rights and fundamental freedoms” the right to leave one's country, together with the right to change one's nationality. Both these asserted rights are studied in historical and philosophical perspective with special reference to what they imply concerning a theory of citizenship.

These rights are novel claims in enumerations of fundamental rights and are at variance with traditional conceptions of state sovereignty and with the practice of many states, past and present. They are also rights which have been infrequently defended, and have often been denied by political and legal philosophers. These critics have usually defended stronger ties of allegiance and obligations between the citizen and the state than is evidently implied by the human rights doctrine.

These asserted rights are clearly grounded in basic liberal values of individual liberty and voluntarism; however, they represent extensions of these values beyond what was usually acknowledged in the classical liberal tradition.