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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

on human rights « Previous | |Next »
September 15, 2009

Regina Kreide in Power and Powerlessness of Human Rights in Krisis (Issue 3 2008) says that:

Despite the theoretical shortcomings of the natural law approach which has been predominant for a long time, there is some continuity between this approach and today’s predominant idea of human rights. Human rights are still described as being characterized by three elements: they are universally valid (or at least that is what they claim to be); they address the individual and not a specific group; and their content is very general. It is be-cause of these elements that human rights claim to be valid independent of future historical developments and cultural diversity

The universality claim is challenged on the grounds that the concept of the individual is presumed even though it is not compatible with the ‘Asian’ ideal of acting responsibly towards the community, nor is it compatible with community-focused practices in some African cultures. Moreover, the legal form of human rights itself prescribes an individualistic perspective incompatible with these traditions.

Secondly, the reason claim is challenged on two grounds. First, though reason stands for the inclusion of all those endowed with reason, it has always disguised the exclusion of parts of the population, and worse, it has at times facilitated colonization and oppression in the name of alleged civilization. Secondly, reason is abstract, and it ‘forgets’ its own local context of emergence by claiming universal validity, thereby ignoring that every historical or cultural context has its own ideas of what makes an action right or wrong.

This critique is important because once one recognizes that the claim of ‘reasons are necessary’ is situated, that there is a fundamental core of irrationality. The human rights framing is one of liberal thought and rational deliberation solidly in the middle of these two extremes of irrationality on the right and the left. Liberals refer to liberal thinking as reason. Anything that is extreme is non-liberal and so non-rational.

We were we were promised liberal democracy but we got capitalism and nationalistic violence instead. With the neo-liberal capitalist formation of the economy we have a hollowing out of civil society, which becomes the market, a technocratic, administrative approach to governance and a partisan divide in politics as formations of power/knowledge.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:20 AM |