Download or read book The Radical Philosophy of Rights written by Costas Douzinas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 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 abandonment of right, virtue and the common good for individual rights and self-interest. The limited and distorted conception of rights of liberal jurisprudence is contrasted with an alternative that sees rights as a relation involved in the struggle for recognition and an everyday utopia. The right to resistance and revolution, prohibited but regularly returning like the repressed, rescues law from sclerosis and presents a case study of the paradoxical nature of rights. Finally, the book offers a brief examination of law’s encounter with radical politics informed by the author’s strange experience as an ‘accidental’ politician in the first radical left government in Europe. The book’s radical concept of legal philosophy and public law will be of considerable value to legal theorists, political philosophers and anyone with an interest in thinking and acting in ways that go beyond the limits of liberal, and neoliberal, ideology.
Download or read book In the Shadow of Justice written by Katrina Forrester and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--
Download or read book Radical Philosophy written by Chad Kautzer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance.
Download or read book The End of Human Rights written by Costas Douzinas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The introduction of the Human Rights Act has led to an explosion in books on human rights, yet no sustained examination of their history and philosophy exists in the burgeoning literature. At the same time, while human rights have triumphed on the world stage as the ideology of postmodernity, our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous, less enlightened one. This book fills the historical and theoretical gap and explores the powerful promises and disturbing paradoxes of human rights. Divided in two parts and fourteen chapters, the book offers first an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights represent the eternal human struggle to resist domination and oppression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At the time of their birth, in the 18th century, and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of the conservatism of law. But the radical energy, symbolic value and apparently endless expansive potential of rights has led to their adoption both by governments wishing to justify their policies on moral grounds and by individuals fighting for the public recognition of private desires and has undermined their ends. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. Rights, the most liberal of institutions, has been largely misunderstood by established political philosophy and jurisprudence as a result of their cognitive limitations and ethically impoverished views of the individual subject and of the social bond. The liberal approaches of Hobbes, Locke and Kant are juxtaposed to the classical critiques of the concept of human rights by Burke, Hegel and Marx. The philosophies of Heidegger, Strauss, Arendt and Sartre are used to deconstruct the concept of the (legal) subject. Semiotics and psychoanalysis help explore the catastrophic consequences of both universalists and cultural relativists when they become convinced about their correctness. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a position of moral transcendence. This is a comprehensive historical and theoretical examination of the discourse and practice of human rights. Using examples from recent moral foreign policies in Iraq, Rwanda and Kosovo, Douzinas radically argues that the defensive and emancipatory role of human rights will come to an end if we do not re-invent their utopian ideal.
Download or read book Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation written by Kathryn McNeilly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the recent backdrop of sociopolitical crisis, radical thinking and activism to challenge the oppressive operation of power has increased. Such thinkers and activists have aimed for radical social transformation in the sense of challenging dominant ways of viewing the world, including the neoliberal illusion of improving the welfare of all while advancing the interests of only some. However, a question mark has remained over the utility of human rights in this activity and the capability of rights to challenge, as opposed to reinforce, discourses such as liberalism, capitalism, internationalism and statism. It is at this point that the present work aims to intervene. Drawing upon critical legal theory, radical democratic thinking and feminist perspectives, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation seeks to reassess the radical possibilities for human rights and explore how rights may be re-engaged as a tool to facilitate radical social change via the concept of ‘human rights to come’. This idea proposes a reconceptualisation of human rights in theory and practice which foregrounds human rights as inherently futural and capable of sustaining a critical relation to power and alterity in radical politics.
Download or read book Human Rights and Empire written by Costas Douzinas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics. Douzinas, a leading scholar and author in the field of human rights and legal theory, considers the most pressing international questions surrounding the legacy and contemporary role of human rights.
Download or read book The Heart of Human Rights written by Allen Buchanan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first attempt to provide an in-depth moral assessment of the heart of the modern human rights enterprise: the system of international legal human rights. It is international human rights law--not any philosophical theory of moral human rights or any "folk" conception of moral human rights--that serves as the lingua franca of modern human rights practice. Yet contemporary philosophers have had little to say about international legal human rights. They have tended to assume, rather than to argue, that international legal human rights, if morally justified, must mirror or at least help realize moral human rights. But this assumption is mistaken. International legal human rights, like many other legal rights, can be justified by several different types of moral considerations, of which the need to realize a corresponding moral right is only one. Further, this volume shows that some of the most important international legal human rights cannot be adequately justified by appeal to corresponding moral human rights. The problem is that the content of these international legal human rights--the full set of correlative duties--is much broader than can be justified by appealing to the morally important interests of any individual. In addition, it is necessary to examine the legitimacy of the institutions that create, interpret, and implement international human rights law and to defend the claim that international human rights law should "trump" the domestic law of even the most admirable constitutional democracies.
Download or read book Democratic Enlightenment written by Jonathan Israel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 1083 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That the Enlightenment shaped modernity is uncontested. Yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does. In Democratic Enlightenment, Israel demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. The American Revolution and its concerns certainly acted as a major factor in the intellectual ferment that shaped the wider upheaval that followed, but the radical philosophes were no less critical than enthusiastic about the American model. From 1789, the General Revolution's impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires, men such as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie moderne"-in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas-into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and Eastern Europe as well as France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. In addition, Israel argues that while all French revolutionary journals powerfully affirmed that la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight, demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste "Revolution of reason."
Download or read book Gender Alterity and Human Rights written by Ratna Kapur and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights rests in turning away from liberal freedom and towards non-liberal registers of freedom.
Download or read book Radical Axiology written by Hugh P. McDonald and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. "First Philosophy," the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald's philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of "existence," "being," "experience," the "subject," or "language," with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy. Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the "death of philosophy," this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today.
Download or read book Radical Enlightenment written by Jonathan Irvine Israel and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readership: Readers with an interest in the European Enlightenment; intellectual and cultural historians; scholars and students of philosophy.
Download or read book Critique of Hegel s Philosophy of Right written by Karl Marx and published by Newcomb Livraria Press. This book was released on with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new 2023 translation of Marx's 1844 "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie" from the original manuscript. This edition includes a new introduction by the translator and reference materials including a Glossary of Philosophic and Economic Marxist Terminology, an Index of Personalities Associated with Marx and a Timeline of Marx’s Life and Works. This is Volume III in The Complete Works of Karl Marx by NL Press. In "Towards the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" Marx's argument is that Hegel's political philosophy is an abstraction that fails to take into account the concrete reality of human existence and the class struggles that shape it. He contends that in order to understand the state, civil society, and the concept of alienation, one must take into account the economic relations that underlie it and the material conditions of society. The central argument of Marx's critique is that the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice, but is rather an instrument of class warefare and exploitation. This is a mimicry of Feuerbach’s argument nearly word-for-word. Marx's critique serves to demonstrate the importance of a historical and materialist perspective in understanding the nature of human freedom and morality. It serves as a precursor to his later theories of historical materialism and dialectical materialism, which continue to be influential in the modern world. Marx's critique in this work centers around the idea that Hegel's philosophy is an abstraction that fails to take into account the concrete reality of human existence and the class struggles that shape it.
Download or read book Key Thinkers of the Radical Right written by Mark Sedgwick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the start of the twenty-first century, the political mainstream has been shifting to the right. The liberal orthodoxy that took hold in the West as a reaction to the Second World War is breaking down. In Europe, populist political parties have pulled the mainstream in their direction; in America, a series of challenges to the Republican mainstream culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. In Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, sixteen expert scholars explain sixteen thinkers, providing an introduction to their life and work, a guide to their thought, and an explanation of their work's reception. The chapters focus on thinkers who are widely read across the political right in both Europe and America, such as Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, and Richard B. Spencer. Featuring classic, modern, and emerging thinkers, this selection provides a good representation of the intellectual right and avoids making political or value judgments. In an increasingly polarized political environment, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right offers a comprehensive and unbiased introduction to the thinkers who form the foundation of the radical right.
Download or read book Socialism Feminism and Philosophy written by Sean Sayers and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology of articles that have appeared in the journal Radical Philosophy. It covers topics in social and moral philosophy which are central to current controversies on the left, engaging with contemporary issues in critical terms.
Download or read book Radical Documentary and Global Crises written by Ryan Watson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When independent filmmakers, activists, and amateurs document the struggle for rights, representation, and revolution, they instrumentalize images by advocating for a particular outcome. Ryan Watson calls this "militant evidence." In Radical Documentary and Global Crises, Watson centers the discussion on extreme conflict, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo. Under these conditions, artists and activists aspire to document, archive, witness, and testify. The result is a set of practices that turn documentary media toward a commitment to feature and privilege the media made by the people living through the terror. This footage is then combined with new digitally archived images, stories, and testimonials to impact specific social and political situations. Radical Documentary and Global Crises re-orients definitions of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its effect is measured, arguing that militant evidence has the power to expose, to amass, and to adjudicate.
Download or read book Radical Philosophy of Law written by David Stanley Caudill and published by Humanities Press International. This book was released on 1995 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical Philosophy of Law represents a cross section of contemporary critiques of the legal establishment--its theoretical foundations and its institutions and processes. Recognizing that proposals for alternatives to mainstream legal theory and practice do not belong to any single discipline, Caudill and Gold select essays by scholars in philosophy, sociology, criminology, and political theory, in addition to law professors and practitioners. Recognizing, as well, that no single perspective dominates radical legal theory, the essays exemplify the approaches associated with Marxian and neo-Marxian analyses, American Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, semiotics, liberal theology, and psychoanalytic theory and criticism.
Download or read book On Human Rights written by James Griffin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term 'human rights' (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.
