PerpleXities... & postmodernity...

Footnotes

[1] Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, Preface, p. xi.

[2] Frédéric Worms, La philosophie en France au XXe siècle: Moments. Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 557.

[3] For an overview of this debate, see Devin O. Pendas, “Towards a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights,” Contemporary European History, 21, 1, 2012, pp. 95-111.

[4] Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, MIT Press, 1996, p. 127. Translated by William Rehg from the German original (Faktizität und Geltung, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992).

[5] Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1977.

[6] As shown by Michel Villey’s sharp critique of the very idea of human rights, in Le droit et les droits de l’homme, Paris, PUF, 1983.

[7] Serge Audier, Le Socialisme libéral, Paris, La Découverte, 2006.

[8] Claude Lefort, “Droits de l’homme et politique” (Human Rights and Politics), Libre, no. 7, 1980. Reprinted in L’Invention démocratique, Paris, Fayard, 1981, pp. 45-84.

[9] Ibid., p. 58.

[10] Of course, in this article I do not explore all of the criticisms of human rights in contemporary thought. In particular, criticisms on the basis of cultural pluralism are not discussed here. The same goes for critiques of human rights policy in international relations, and critiques that see declarations of rights as expressions of domination. My interest here is rather in the challenge to human rights policy on the grounds that it entails risking a form of social atomism and democratic disintegration.

[11] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 1981, p. 67.

[12] Alain de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights, UK, Arktos Media Ltd., 2011. Translated by Alexander Jacob from the French original (Au-delà des droits de l’homme, Paris, Krisis, 2004).

[13] See especially Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda, New York, Crown, 1993; Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, as well as his Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1996; and Thomas L. Pangle, The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenges of the Post-Modern Age, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

[14] Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, op. cit., p. 33.

[15] See especially Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, New York, Free Press, 1991.

[16] See especially Mark Lilla, New French Thought, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994.

[17] See especially two books by Marcel Gauchet, L’Avènement de la démocratie, Tome 1, La Révolution moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 2007, pp. 16-20, and La Démocratie contre elle-même, Paris, Gallimard, 2002; and two by Pierre Manent, Cours familiers de philosophie politique, Paris, Fayard, 2001, and La Raison des nations, Paris, Gallimard, 2006.

[18] Marcel Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, p. 111.

[19] Pierre Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique, Paris, Fayard, 2001, p. 180. Notice how Manent uses writers (Marx in this instance) to reach quite different conclusions from those that they intended to support. Jean-Yves Pranchère drew this to my attention.

[20] Jean-Claude Michéa, La double pensée: Retour sur la question libérale, Paris, Champs, 2008, p. 252.

[21] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 299.

[22] Philippe Raynaud, Trois révolutions de la liberté. Angleterre, Amérique, France, Paris, PUF, 2009, p. 35. See also Raynaud’s preface to Hannah Arendt, L’humaine condition, Paris, Gallimard, 2012, pp. 26-30.

[23] Antoine Garapon, “Edgar Quinet, pourfendeur de l’antijuridisme français,” presented in the 2009-2010 seminar on Justice at the Institut des Hautes Etudes, 30 November 2009.

[24] See Serge Audier, La Pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle, Paris, La Découverte, 2008, p. 313.

[25] See the 2012 Human Rights Watch Report.

[26] See Richard Wolin, “From the ‘Death of Man’ to Human Rights: The Paradigm Change in French Intellectual Life, 1968-1986,” in The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society, New York, Routledge, 2006.

[27] Catherine Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans demos, Paris, PUF, 2011, p. 6.

[28] Jeremy Waldron, Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, London, Methuen, 1987, p. 196 (emphasis in original).

[29] Michael W. McCann, Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

[30] Liora Israël, L’Arme du droit, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2009, p. 129.

[31] Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, second edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 173, 210.

[32] See especially John Tomasi, “Individual Rights and Community Virtues,” Ethics, vol. 101, no. 3, 1991, pp. 521-536, and Kenneth Baynes, “Rights as Critique and the Critique of Rights: Karl Marx, Wendy Brown and the Social Function of Rights,” Political Theory, vol. 28, no. 4, 2000, pp. 451-468.

[33] Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2010.

[34] Claude Lefort, “Les droits de l’homme et l’État Providence,” in Essais sur le politique, Paris, Seuil, 1986, pp. 33-63.

[35] Serge Audier, La Pensée anti-68, op. cit., p. 312.

[36] Catherine Colliot-Thélène, “L’interprétation des droits de l’homme: enjeux politiques et théoriques au prisme du débat français,” Trivium, 3, 2009.

[37] Claude Lefort, “La communication démocratique,” Esprit, 1979, reprinted in Le Temps present: Ecrits 1945-2005, Paris, Belin, 2007, p. 389.

[38] Claude Lefort, “La pensée politique devant les droits de l’homme” (1980), in Le Temps present, op.cit.

[39] Claude Lefort, “La communication démocratique”, op. cit., p. 395.

[40] Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, London and New York, Verso, 2006, p. 15. Translated by Steve Corcoran from the French original (La Haine de la démocratie, Paris, La Fabrique, 2005).

[41] Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 2/3, 2004, p. 304.

[42] This was Étienne Tassin’s description, in the doctoral seminar “Polis” at the Université libre de Bruxelles on 22 May 2012. One could also say that about Lefort, who in his essay on Arendt seems to miss the similarities between his concept of human rights and Arendt’s, which he compares to Burke’s. Claude Lefort, “Hannah Arendt et la question du politique,” in Essais sur le politique, op. cit., pp. 72-74. On this point, see Jeffrey C. Isaac, “A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights,” American Political Science Review, vol. 90, no. 1, 1996, pp. 61-72.

[43] Ayten Gündogdu, “Perplexities of the rights of man: Arendt on the aporias of human rights,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2012.

[44] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, op. cit., p. 106. This passage came to my attention by its citation (from a French translation) by Ayten Gündogdu, op. cit., p. 16.

[45] Étienne Tassin, “Hannah Arendt: la signification politique des droits de l’homme,” paper presented to the doctoral seminar “Polis” at the Université libre de Bruxelles on 22 May 2012.

[46] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford (CA), Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 134. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen from the Italian original (Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Torino, Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., 1995).

[47] Étienne Balibar, La Proposition d’égaliberté, Paris, PUF, 2010, p. 67.

[48] Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time (the title given to the first UK edition of what was published in 1951 in the USA as The Origins of Totalitarianism), London, Martin Secker & Warburg, 1951, Ch. 13 (“Concluding Remarks”), p. 439. This chapter, which Arendt removed from later editions of her book, has recently been reprinted as an appendix in The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Schocken Books, 2004, pp. 618-32.

[49] James D. Ingram, “What is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights,” American Political Science Review, vol. 102, no. 4, November 2008, p. 402.

[50] Ibid., p. 414.

[51] Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, Cambridge (UK) and Malden (MA, USA), Polity Press, 2012, p. 75. Translated by Ciaran Cronin from the German original (Zur Verfassung Europas: Ein Essay [On the Constitution of Europe: An Essay], Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011).

To quote this article :

Justine Lacroix, « Human Rights and Politics. 1980-2012 », Books and Ideas, 24 October 2012. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/Human-Rights-and-Politics.html