Which Critique of Human Rights? Evaluating the post-colonialist and the post-Althusserian alternatives

Abstract

In a short pamphlet written in 1808 bearing the title Who thinks abstractly?, Hegel joined his contemporary debates concerning the importance of the recent French Revolution. His position basically reverts the arguments advanced by the German nationalists and by various conservatives like Joseph de Maistre or Edmund Burke: while these authors accuse the abstraction of the French principles (equality, liberty etc.) and oppose to it the richness of the local customs, traditions and common sense, Hegel argues that, on the contrary, it is the common sense and common people who think abstractly, while the presumably abstract principles of the French revolution open up the space in which a concrete understanding of human nature can take place. In today’s world, one could say that the legacy of human rights is in need of a similar Hegelian reversal. The general trend regarding human rights consists nowadays in a constant attack on the formal, empty, abstract nature of the declaration of human rights, and an emphasis on the possible alternatives to it, namely the plural, rich, vivid, authentic particular cultures, narratives, situations. To put it in Hegelian terms, this contemporary trend could be accounted as demanding a necessary passage from ‘abstract right’ to ‘morality’ – where morality is to be