The Cultural Politics of Human

Rights – Week 2
The Natural Rights Debates –
John Locke, Edmund Burke, Jeremy
Bentham & Karl Marx
 The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
- Week 2
Tony Evans – 3 discourses – ‘human rights talk’
• Philosophy – abstract discourse – aim to identify timeless
foundations that justify and sustain human rights – ‘natural
rights’
• Legal – international law – tension with sovereignty, non-
intervention and domestic jurisdiction
• Political – power/interests – how philosophical and legal
discourses sustain particular forms of power and interests
– according to critics it is seen to be ideological…our
focus is on this by using Neil Stammers social
constructionist account of human rights and power
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
Tony Evans

‘It is the tripartite nature of human rights talk that adds to

simultaneous feeling of optimism and pessimism. The abstract
moral, utopian approach of philosophy, which allows us to
glimpse a better future, fills us with hope, while the empirical,
neutral, norm-driven approaches of international law reassure us
that international society has taken firm action on human rights.
Together these two discourses conspire to marginalize the
political discourses, and thus exclude consideration of prevailing
economic, social and political structures and practices that
support particular interests while sustaining the conditions for
continued human rights violations’ (p.8)
 The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
• Human rights have a philosophical and political history =
still relevant today
• Rights/human rights did not appear out of a vacuum = key is
Western political history and European Enlightenment
• The Enlightenment refers to the intellectual movement which
began in England in the seventeenth century (esp. Locke) –
Kant – ‘emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy.
Infancy is the inability to use one’s reason without the
guidance of another’
• It is an era of awakening – science, rationality/reason and
secularism = modern secular rights are key in this!
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
- Week 2
Lynn Hunt (2007: 2)

‘Declarations of human rights always make universalistic claims that resound

with brave confidence. In 1948, for example, the United Nations (UN)
adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it claimed that
“recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of
all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and
peace in the world”. Yet these confident claims rest on a series of troubling
paradoxes. Human rights are supposed to be eternal and universal,
engraved, as it were, in human nature. But not everyone believes them to
be inscribed in human nature, and the notion itself of human rights has a
distinct history; it entered into political discourse only at certain times and
in specific places. What is imagined to be universal and above history turns
out to be contingent and grounded in a particular history. Does this paradox
undermine their validity’
 The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
Costas Douzinas (2002) The End(s) of Human Rights

‘Ancient Greece did not distinguish between law and convention or rights
and custom. Custom is a strong cement: it binds families and communities
firmly, but it can also numb. Without external standards, the development of a
critical approach towards traditional authority is impossible: the given goes
unchallenged and the slaves stay in line. Originally, the root of all authority is
the ancestral.

But the discovery, or invention, of the concept of nature challenged the claim of
the ancestral. Philosophy could now appeal from the ancestral to the good – to
that which is good intrinsically, by nature. Nature as a critical concept acquired
philosophical currency in the fifth century BCE when it was used by the sophists
against custom and law, and by Socrates and Plato in order to combat moral
relativism of the sophists and to restore the authority of reason. Turning nature
into norm or into the standard of right was the greatest early step of civilisation,
but it was also a cunning trick against priests and rulers…’
 The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
• Rights = subversive ideas = appeared in
documents drafted in the final decades of 1700s
• Trial and execution of King Charles I (1649)
 King is subject to the law – not above it!
 He had broken the scared reciprocal bond between
King and subjects
 By making war, he had forfeited his right to their
allegiance
= demands for individual freedom from absolutist
control….
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
…US Declaration of Independence (1776) and The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
(1789) = the seeds of liberal democracy
The set out – (1) short-term political goals and (2)
articulate a philosophical account of what it means
to have legitimate government (especially in terms
of the relationship between government and the
governed. This remains an important issue today in
terms of the state as the principal bearer/guarantor
or rights and rights as checks on government power
as well)
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
John Locke (1632-1704) –
Two Treatises of Government
• Secular theory of human rights
• Natural rights » natural law
• Expression’s of God’s will » reasoning »
discoverable by all human beings
• Reason » peace and preservation of mankind
• Natural law = right to life, liberty and property
& a natural duty to respect rights of others
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2

• State of nature – prior to civil society

• Equal freedoms
• Locke –
‘The State of nature has a Law of Nature to govern it,
which obliges every one: And reason, which is that
law, teaches all Mankind…that being all equal and
independent, no one ought to harm another in his
Life, Health, Liberty or Possessions’ (6.6-10)
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
• State of nature characterized by conflict

Locke (An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding): ‘Nature…has put into man a desire
of happiness, and an aversion to misery; these, indeed
are innate practical principles’.

Men ‘must be allowed to pursue their happiness, nay,

cannot be hindered’.
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
• No impartial arbiter in the state of nature
• To avoid conflict men agree to establish a
political community
• Social contract = men agree to unanimously
pool their natural powers
• Move from a state of nature to civil society
• Transfer is conditional on the protection of
rights of life, liberty and property
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
• Individual liberty and private property
• Society-individual
• Legitimacy, role and limits of government
• Government and consent
• No-one can transfer rights to an arbitrary power or
political authority without consent
• Role of government derived from and limited by
natural rights
• Function of government = maintenance, protection
and enforcement of rights = disobedience, rebellion
and revolution.
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
…Something bigger was going on … Locke was
protesting against established government,
monarchical absolutism and paternalistic
rule…Using the discourse of natural rights to
challenge power! The English Enlightenment
was also underway – times were changing …
Traditional authority was being contested and
challenged by reason and science.
NB – American Declaration of Independence
(1776) and French Declaration on the Rights
 The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
Critiques of natural rights
• Edmund Burke – ‘metaphysical abstraction’
• Jeremy Bentham – utilitarian, legal positivist =
‘nonsense on stilts’, ‘anarchical fallacies,
metaphysical entities which could not be shown to
exist’ – ‘Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment’
• Karl Marx – presuppose bourgeois individualist
model of human beings – private gate, egoism and
exploitation – ideological device of the ruling
classes
The Cultural Politics of Human Rights
– Week 2
Homework:
- Do you think there are natural rights? What
are they? Why?
- How relevant are Locke’s ideas about the
limits of government in today’s world?
- Choose a revolution or social movement of
your choice and explore the various rights
claims and counter claims being made.