Abstract
Standard wisdom has it that rights and democracy are both analytically distinct and in conflict with each other. Throughout the 19th century up to our day, liberals (political or economic) have advocated the rights of man, to protect the individual from arbitrary government. They frame human rights as universal moral principles that, together with general rule of law principles, constitutionalism, the separation of powers, and so on, secure individual liberty against both autocracy and democracy. Indeed, the point of constitutionalizing human rights is to limit government (executives and legislatures) by taking the most basic personal interests or concerns out of the domain of politics so that they can function as trumps.1 Rights limit what democratic majorities in power can do. They are matters of principle, as Dworkin famously had it, while democracy is about preferences, majority interests, and opinions that steer the exercise of state power.2 In other words, unlike the rights of man, democracy involves politics in the sense of aggregating an electoral majority out of the clash of particular interests, in the sense of policy making and in the sense of governing and using state power to enforce collectively binding decisions.
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Notes
R. Dworkin (1977) Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) pp. 72–103,
R. Dworkin (1977) Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) 184–205.
R. Dworkin (1985) A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
C. Lefort (1986) “Totalitarianism without Stalin” in The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press), pp. 52–88.
J. Habermas (1996) “A Reconstructive Approach to Law I: The System of Rights”, Chapter 3 of Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: Polity Press) pp. 82–131;
C. Lefort (1988) “The Question of Democracy” in Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) pp. 9–21.
M. E. Keck and K. Sikkink (1988) Activists Beyond Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press);
S. Moyn (2010) The Last Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
For a similar point regarding the freemasons see R. Koselleck (1988) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press).
See J. L. Cohen (2012) Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
R. G. Teitel (2011) Humanity’s Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
B. A. Simmons (2009) Mobilizing for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
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© 2013 Jean L. Cohen
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Cohen, J.L. (2013). Rethinking the Politics of Human Rights and Democracy with and beyond Lefort. In: Plot, M. (eds) Claude Lefort. Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375581_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375581_10
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