[Marxism] communal counterview to the dominant definition of democracy in thrall to free market ideology

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Review: Human Rights in Crisis: The Sacred and the Secular in
Contemporary French Thought, by Genevieve Souilac

June 4, 2006 9:13 | By Dr Ingrid Waasenaar


Geneviève Souillac's book acts as a timely reminder of the
specifically French contribution to the very idea of human rights.
This is important territory, given the kinds of human rights conflicts
that we have been witnessing in the wake of 9/11, as well as the
ongoing use of human rights as a sort of triage tool, allowing or
disallowing developing countries into rich Western trading zones.

The point about the French approach to human rights is that it is
philosophical in kind, rather than instrumental. The great difference
between the American and the French model of Human Rights is inscribed
in the very embryonic stages of their development.

The Americans needed a concept of rights in order to sever ties with
England, and set up their New World. In a sense, they could be quite
slap dash about exactly what those rights were.

But the French needed rights in order to do away with monarchy
altogether, and establish a new order over the top of it. The French,
after their Revolution, were in a much more uncertain position than
the Americans, a few years earlier. They needed to justify their
revolutionary actions in putting the monarch to death. They had to do
away altogether with the ghost of the divine in kingship. In other
words they had to find a way to secularize what had been a sacred
institution.

They were therefore determined to base their justification of human
rights on reason, rather than nature. Their conception of human rights
was highly experimental, a projection of an entirely new system of
governance into an uncertain future, rather than a way to protect the
little guy against big government. Their view of human rights was
foundational rather than protectionist.

For the French revolutionaries, the whole point was to integrate the
notion of the individual into an understanding of citizenship. They
refused to divorce the private from the public realm, pointing out the
paradoxes of such a separation: every individual participates in the
formation of the State, and unless power is defined in this way,
tyranny of the one over the many inevitably follows, they argued.

The French tend to go back to first principles in order to critique
the current state of democracy, and it is because French thinkers are
searching and critical of their own experiment in democracy that they
have something to contribute to the Anglo-American debate on human
rights.

Souillac's account is exceptionally clear and careful. It details the
way four French philosophers - Gauchet, Kriegel, Ferry and Balibar -
look at human rights as a way of shaking up democracy and making it
think about itself.

Her chosen philosophers all insist that individuals are political and
social before they are private, and that human rights are about the
public consequences of abuse - not purely a way to protect personal
freedom. The French individual is first and foremost a citoyen, an
element linked into a unified whole, not a person out for his own
self-interest. At least that's the idea.

The one problem with French thinking about human rights, Souillac
argues, is that it runs the risk of reifying 'Society', making it into
another overarching, overwhelming, quasi-divine category. But this is
only if we forget that the analysis of human rights can be used a kind
of deconstructive tool, unsettling fixed definitions of democracy. And
the fundamental point to bear in mind here is that human rights belong
to flesh and blood humans, encountering one another, vulnerable,
engaged, and burdened with the responsibility of their own democracy.

Gauchet, Kriegel, Ferry and Balibar all see themselves as critics
rather than rulemakers, though some are more critical, others more
reformist. Here worried about the loss of political engagement in
established democracies, there idealizing the return of the humanist
subject, they are all suspicious of triumphalism when it comes to
democracy.

Democracy is not 'here to stay', or 'the way of the future', not
unproblematically. Democracy has to be earnt, as each individual takes
on board his or her civic responsibility. It is condemned to perpetual
renewal and a terrifying provisionality.

Souillac's book comes as a very welcome intervention in an often
airless debate. Her impressive and toughminded marshalling of the
arguments of her four chosen thinkers will give invaluable leverage to
students trying to understand the shape of the human rights debate
today. It offers a wonderfully searching and coherent counterview to
the dominant definition of democracy in thrall to free market
ideology. For these French philosophers, democracy is a struggle, not
a format.

The reviewer, Dr Ingrid Wassenaar, works in the Department of French
at the University of Sydney, Australia











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