Human Rights and the Political Paradox

Rather it is predicated on a common understanding of what makes human life intolerable (Ignatieff56).6 This consensus is negative in that it requires only a limited form of reciprocity according to which we consider what it is in our mutual interest to avoid in political life (Shklar 10). Since it is not possible to 'conceive of any circumstances in which we might excuse [human rights violations such as torture] against ourselves or anyone we know, we have good reason to believe that such practices should be outlawed' (Ignatieff89).7 The cosmopolitan basis of human rights is thus premised on the universality of fear, which becomes politically relevant when its object is the cruelty inflicted by the state (Ignatieff80; Shklar 11).8 If what binds the community of human rights holders together is a shared aversion to the abuse of state power, what makes a shared commitment to human rights possible is a 'pragmatic silence on ultimate questions' (Ignatieff78). In Lefort's view, Marx accepts liberal philosophy's image of civil society as composed of individuals and its reduction of human rights to individual rights (Democracy 30). Since Marx remains trapped by liberalism's atomistic representation of civil society, he fails to recognize the implicit communal character of human rights (Democracy 32).17 The 'private' freedoms declared to be the rights of man, Lefort argues, also inaugurate in practice a 'new mode of access to the public sphere' (Lefort, Political Forms 249). According to Lefort, Marx's heteronymous view of politics as a product of socio-economic conditions does not allow him to grasp 'the historical mutation in which power is assigned limits and right is fully recognized as existing outside power' (Political Forms 254). [...]it remains to be considered what role human rights might play in a politics of transformation (see Balibar, 'Three concepts'; Ingram 'Democracy') that acts precisely on the non-political conditions that continue to shape political life.