Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: images of law
- Meditation 1 Inter-disciplinarity, the epistemological ideal of incontrovertible foundations, and the problem of praxis
- Meditation 2 On the concept of law
- Meditation 3 On constitutions and fragmented orders
- Meditation 4 Of experts, helpers, and enthusiasts
- Meditation 5 The power of metaphors and narratives: systems, teleology, evolution, and the issue of the “global community”
- Meditation 6 Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”
- Meditation 7 The politics of rights
- Meditation 8 The limits and burdens of rights
- Meditation 9 The bounds of (non)sense
- Index
- References
Meditation 7 - The politics of rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: images of law
- Meditation 1 Inter-disciplinarity, the epistemological ideal of incontrovertible foundations, and the problem of praxis
- Meditation 2 On the concept of law
- Meditation 3 On constitutions and fragmented orders
- Meditation 4 Of experts, helpers, and enthusiasts
- Meditation 5 The power of metaphors and narratives: systems, teleology, evolution, and the issue of the “global community”
- Meditation 6 Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”
- Meditation 7 The politics of rights
- Meditation 8 The limits and burdens of rights
- Meditation 9 The bounds of (non)sense
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
Rights, and especially human rights, we are told, are fundamental. They serve as “trumps” in legal arguments and are held to be of universal and trans-historical validity, identifying us as “humans” and not as a member (only) of this or that society. Despite the fact that they appear at a certain time in history, their status is supposed to be based on their “transcendental” nature by either being part of a natural order of things, or by virtue of the fact that they are intuited. They can be “declared” but not “made” as are other laws, even though they need to be formulated to find their way into constitutional texts. Thus rights claims give rise to a specific “rights talk,” which is, in spite of the fiction of its perennial existence, a specific modern phenomenon. It reached one of its peaks by the end of the eighteenth century – after a relatively short incubation period during the English Glorious Revolution – in the American and French Revolutions, and another in the post-Second World War era, particularly since the 1980s. Here the conjuncture of the “rights revolution” led first to the civil rights movement, and then to the adoption of a rights talk by transnational movements that pinpointed gross violations of individual rights by governments worldwide. After the collapse of the main alternative utopia to the Western political project, that is “communism,” the subsequent “silent revolutions” were increasingly fuelled by a “human” rather than merely a “civic” rights discourse.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Status of Law in World SocietyMeditations on the Role and Rule of Law, pp. 200 - 229Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
, “Rights as Trumps,” in (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford University Press, 1984), 153–67Google Scholar
, “Are there any Natural Rights?,” in (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford University Press, 1984), 77–90Google Scholar
, “Universal Human Rights: A Critique,” in and (eds.), Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 103–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Human Rights,” in and (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010), 321–38Google Scholar
, “The World Turned Upside Down: Human Rights and International Relations,” International Affairs, vol. 87, no. 5 (2011), 1159–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar
’ contribution to the modern rights debate in his “Rights at the Cutting Edge,” in , and (eds.), A Debate over Rights (Oxford University Press, 1998), 115–233Google Scholar
, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar
, Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke, Marx on the Rights of Man (London: Methuen 1987), 196Google Scholar
, The Greek Discovery of Politics, transl. by David McClintock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
, Rhetoric, Book I, XII, 2–5 at 1378b2-3, ed. and transl. by J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 139Google Scholar
, The Epic of Latin America, 4th edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, “Theories of Desire: Antigone Again,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37 (Winter 2011), 169–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Rechtslehre, transl. by as Immanuel Kant: The Philosophy of Law (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1887), Prolegomena, sec. II: The Division of a Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 20–6Google Scholar
and (eds.), Human Rights and Development: Towards Mutual Reinforcement (Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Nature of Rights,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 33, no. 5 (2005), 223–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “A Hybrid Theory of Claim Rights,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 25, no. 5 (2005), 257–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “Theories of Rights: Is there a Third Way?,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 27, no. 2 (2007), 281–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Asian African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 80Google Scholar
, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego/New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1976), 292Google Scholar
, “The Social Construction of International Human Rights,” in and (eds.), Human Rights and Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999): 71–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Farmer Refuted” (February 23, 1775) in et al. (eds.), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. I, 122Google Scholar
, “Tradition, Human Rights, and the English Revolution,” in , and (eds.), Human Rights and Revolutions (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 43–58Google Scholar
, “The Bill of Rights and the American Revolutionary Experience,” in and (eds.), A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics and Law 1791–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 62–97, at 67Google Scholar
, Constitutional History of the American Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)Google Scholar
(ed.), Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution of Law (New York University Press, 1981)Google Scholar
, Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, vol. 1, 1750–1765 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar
, “Natural Rights in the American Revolution,” in , and (eds.), Human Rights and Revolutions (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 59–76Google Scholar
, “Lectures on Law,” in Works, ed. by James De Witt Andrews, 2 vols. (Chicago: Callaghan and Co, 1896), vol. II, 303 and 307Google Scholar
, The Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1987)Google Scholar
, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1959 and 1964), particularly vol. I, chapter 5Google Scholar
, “The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights” in , and (eds.), Human Rights and Revolutions (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 3–17 at 8Google Scholar
, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminism and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967)Google Scholar
, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, Domesticating Passion: Rousseau, Woman and the Nation (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1997)Google Scholar
, “Feminism, the Individual and Contract Theory,” Ethics, vol. 100 (April 1990), 658–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 39–53Google Scholar
The Papers of James Madison, ed. by et al., vol. XI (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977): 297–300 at 297fGoogle Scholar
, “The British, the Americans and Rights,” in and (eds.), A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics and Law 1791–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1991): 366–439 at 377Google Scholar
, The History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983–85)Google Scholar
, “The Core of the Case Against Judicial Review,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 115 (2006), 1348–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), Introduction at XIGoogle Scholar
, “Rights,” in , and (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 292–308Google Scholar
, On the Dignity of Man, transl. by Charles Glenn Wallis (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998)Google Scholar
, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958)Google Scholar
, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, trans. by Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1992)Google Scholar
, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that of Which is to Come (Oxford University Press, (1678) 2008)Google Scholar
, Pilgrimage, Politics and International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “The Context of Autonomy: Some Presuppositions of the Comprehensibility of Human Rights,” Daedalus, vol. 112 (Fall 1983), 255–77, at 259Google Scholar
, “A Transcivilisational Perspective on Global Legal Order in the 21st Century: A Way to Overcome West-centric and Judiciary-centric Deficits in International Legal Thought,” in and (eds.), Towards World Constitutionalism (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2005), 151–89Google Scholar
“The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective,” Asian Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2 (1991), 127–40Google Scholar
, On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Discourse on Method, transl. by (London: Penguin 1962), at 38 and 45 (2nd and 3rd Discourse)Google Scholar
, Zum Ewigen Frieden (Berlin: Preussische Akademieausgabe): 372
, “Miserable Comforters: International Relations as a New Natural Law,” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 15 (2009), 395–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar