The consequences of rights

Ben Dorfman

The Consequences of Rights

History, Politics, Writing

Bruxelles · Berlin · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford

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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dorfman, Ben, author.

Title: The consequences of rights : history, politics, writing / Ben Dorfman.

Description: New York : Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2025. | Series: Political and social change, 2198-8595 ; Vol. 11 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024058878 (print) | LCCN 2024058879 (ebook) | ISBN 9783631927359 (hardback) | ISBN 9783631931189 (ebook) | ISBN 9783631931196 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Human rights--Philosophy. | Learning and scholarship--Moral and ethical aspects.

Classification: LCC JC571 .D7585 2025 (print) | LCC JC571 (ebook) | DDC 323--dc23/eng/20250130

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024058878

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024058879

Cover Image: © Akarawut/shutterstock.com

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISSN 2198-8595

ISBN 978-3-631-92735-9 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-93118-9 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-93119-6 (E-PUB)

DOI 10.3726/b22581

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)

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Contents

Preface/Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Historical Phenomenology of Human Rights: Rights, History, Advocacy

Human Rights and World Government

Writing Human Rights: Towards an Academic Journalism

Epilogue: Rights and the Future

List of Figures

Preface/Acknowledgements

One is sometimes unsure how to bring a long-term project to either a close or an end. In this case, that wasn’t easy to do—the original concept for this work being a politico-philosophical tract that would use the two volumes which precede it, written in a style I call “academic journalism” and “historical commentary,” as a notebook leading to a set of observations that would theorize the principles, or lay out the schematics, for what we might call the “better society.” As such, it should do battle with great works from the past, from Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), and speak academically (“academically”) in a way the previous volumes largely do not. Still, I admit the last point as based on perspective. The non-academic readers I’ve had for the previous volumes have told me they come off as academic enough.

Still, going some distance down that road, that approach felt off—that as the idea of conversations, or “observations” and “discussion,” was the driving force beneath the thoughtways that led to this work. It thus seemed appropriate to complete the last volume in a similar style: oriented towards having a fully academic discussion in what I hope—hope—registers as a colloquial style. That generated this book’s problematic: discussing, inside the space of one academic’s knowledge, what it meant to encounter rights—among modernity’s most profound concepts. By “encounter,” I mean not hearing the idea for the first time, but engaging it substantively—looking under the hood, at relevant literature, and vis-à-vis as many fields as one can stick one’s toes into within the humanities and social sciences. It’s a portrait of one day-to-day academic thinking through the problems he or she sees when he (in this case) engages in criticism and commentary on global rights issues. It’s for other academics who might seek to compare that to their experiences, or, alternatively, the general reader who might seek an essay or two (or three) on how a rights scholar justifies rights advocacy—that in addition to what they take as human rights’ political consequences and what it means to write on the issue simultaneously from the position of scholar and thinker at-large. The criteria for this book’s success are if it provokes readers to think about how they see similar issues as simply themselves.

As I engage this effort, I’d like to thank friends and good colleagues Mats Andrén, Katarina Leppänen, Rebecka Lettevall, Barbara Falk, and Kalle Pihlainen for provocative discussion and, over the years, comments and feedback on writing that played into this work. The DEMOS research group at Aalborg University has also been crucial, as has been the willingness of this series editors, Martin Bak Jørgensen and Óscar García Agustín, to entertain a different kind of engagement with critical-academic issues. And I’m indebted to my students whose interests, questions, and perspectives drive so much of what I do. Finally, I thank Kerstin Drenkhahn, whose joie de vivre and interest in simply sitting for hours and asking, “what do you write on?” led to an energy and reflectiveness crucial to the pages at hand. The future belongs to those who come after. We can but prepare the spaces in which they might operate.

Ben Dorfman

Ahrensburg, Germany

September 2023

Introduction

Human rights are a cipher. E.g., in the 1870s, Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, said their case was “too plain for argument.”¹ Now, here, he described women’s rights—why, he asked (why?) weren’t women’s rights on par with the privileges of men? We’re “on the same earth,” we “breathe the same air,” we “eat the same food,” be that the food of the body or the food of the mind.² We might pretend human rights are up for debate. Yet we know we should have them, as should all of our fellow women and men.

I take comfort in this. Human rights should be obvious, as such. Yet, we brutalize each other over the same ideas. I remember the ‘90s: Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians all claimed the others denied their right to exist.³ Now, some of that was bunk—such as when Serbian President Slobodan Milošević (brought before the ICC for war crimes) said on Sky Television that Serbs were only involved in “self-defense.”⁴ As they sponsored what’s been seen as a genocide, they posed it as their existence that was really at stake.⁵ Still, social philosopher Axel Honneth argues that rights concern “degradation” over and above the “subtle,” small-scale humiliations we endure in everyday life.⁶ We should try—try—not to force each other to do things against our will. We can feel it: when we’re coerced, as well as those moments when we’re nominally free.