Cosmopolitan entitlements. The construction and constitution of human beings as human rights subjects

Abstract The framework of human rights is becoming increasingly central to perceptions of global problems and to demands for transnational solidarity. At the same time, human rights are an object of criticism. In both cases, the term “human rights” is often used with a strong normative and essentialist bias. When viewed through the lens of a sociology of knowing, it proves to be based on implicit, unexamined assumptions. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct these assumptions and to clarify the social meaning of – and need for – human rights in a reflexive, cosmopolitan modernity; it investigates the construction and constitution of human beings as human rights subjects. What makes an individual a human being in the sense in which the term is used in the symbolic language of human rights? What conception of the human (and hence of the social) is inscribed in the patterns of thought, feeling and action underlying the framework of human rights? I argue that the human rights subject represents an ultimate status category and transnational figure of knowledge. It is a post-heroic subject, determined and defined by cosmopolitan entitlements: the ontological state of vulnerability, the cultural primacy of dignity and the fragility of human existence.