Government derives its power from the rights of individuals. The rights of individuals derive from the power of government. The social contract gives us the benefits of cooperation and leads us to equality. There are positive as well as general substantive rights. But this is misleading.
Positive rights come at the expense of general rights.
If you have a positive right to housing, for example, then others have no general right not to provide you housing, that is, to do something else with their time, effort, and money. So, your positive right to housing comes at the expense of our general right to property Rousseau, in recognizing substantive positive rights, limits general rights Burke's critique of rights Burke starts with Rousseau's view of rights. No moral theory can answer these questions.