Metaphilosophy 40 (1):8-23 (2009)
Abstract |
Abstract: The cosmopolitan imagination constructs a world order in which the idea of human rights is an operative principle of justice. Does it also construct an idealisation of human rights? The radicality of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kant, lay in its analysis of the roots of organised violence in the modern world and its visionary programme for changing the world. Today, the temptation that faces the cosmopolitan imagination is to turn itself into an endorsement of the existing order of human rights without a corresponding critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence. Is the critical idealism associated with Kantian cosmopolitanism at risk of transmutation into an uncritical positivism? We find two prevailing approaches: either the constitutional framework of the existing world order is presented as the realisation of the cosmopolitan vision, or cosmopolitanism is turned into a utopian vision of a world order in which power is subordinated to the rule of international law. I suggest that the difficulties associated with both wings of cosmopolitanism threaten the legitimacy of the project and call for an understanding and culture of human rights that is less exclusively "conceptual" and more firmly grounded in social theory.
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Keywords | Kant cosmopolitanism global human rights social theory Enlightenment |
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DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9973.2009.01566.x |
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References found in this work BETA
Elements of the Philosophy of Right.Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel - 1991 - Cambridge University Press.
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Giorgio Agamben & Daniel Heller-Roazen - 2000 - Substance 29 (3):124.
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Citations of this work BETA
Sovereignty, Society and Human Rights: Theorising Society and Human Survival in Times of Global Crisis.Angela Leahy - 2022 - Thesis Eleven 170 (1):28-42.
Realising Immigration as a Human Right: Public Justification and Cosmopolitan Solidarity.Alexander Elliott & David Martínez - 2022 - European Journal of Social Theory 25 (2):235-251.
Critical Human Rights and Liberal Legality: Struggling for “The Right to Have Communal Rights”.Roger Merino Acuña - 2013 - Philosophy Study 3 (3).
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