The End of Human Rights

Author: Costas Douzinas
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-05-01
Features: This book includes: The Triumph of Human Rights; Hobbes and Locke's Views on Natural Rights; Revolution and Declaration: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Others; Classical Critique of Rights: Burke and Marx; Free Subject and Dependent Subject; Legal Subject: Rights and Legal Humanitarianism. The stark contrast between the ideological triumph of human rights and the disasters it has produced in practice powerfully explains the cynicism of postmodernism—compliance, indifference—a combination of strong political despair and existential claustrophobia with enlightenment principles—why it refuses to retreat in a changing society. When defenders of pragmatism point out the end of ideology, the end of history, and the end of utopia, it does not mean that human rights have won; on the contrary, it leads human rights to its ultimate. When human rights lose its utopian goal, human rights also end. This book includes: The Triumph of Human Rights; Hobbes and Locke's Views on Natural Rights; Revolution and Declaration: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Others; Classical Critique of Rights: Burke and Marx; Free Subject and Dependent Subject; Legal Subject: Rights and Legal Humanitarianism.