Description
Book SynopsisAfter 1989 human rights have expanded into a vernacular touching every aspect of social life. They are seen as the key concept in morals and politics and a main tool for forging individual and collective identities. They are the ideology after the end of ideologies' the only values left after the end of history'. The response of the left to the rights revolution has been muted and unsure. Classical Marxist critiques of (natural) rights have made the left justly suspicious, and this is still the case today. Elaborating and addressing a series of foundational paradoxes of rights, this book the third in Costas Douzinas's human rights trilogy, following The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire provides a long-overdue re-evaluation of the history and political uses of rights for the left.
The book examines the history and philosophy of the (legal) person, the subject, the human and dignity from classical Rome to postmodern Brussels. It traces the gradual
Table of Contents
Introduction: life between university and parliament
PART I
Law, persons, rights
Prologue: are women and animals persons?
1 A brief history of the person
2 The story of dignitas
3 What is the legal person?
4 Subject, individual, human
5 Legality after virtue: from (objective) right to (subjective) rights
PART II
The paradoxes of rights
6 The paradoxes of human rights
7 Rights, identity, desire
8 Marx, the radical left and rights
9 The poverty of (rights) jurisprudence
PART III
The right to resistance
10 Philosophy and resistance
11 The ‘right to the event’: the legality and morality of revolution and resistance
12 Prolegomena towards a theory of righting
Epilogue: critical legal studies goes Greek
Bibliography
Index
