Modern political revolutions since the 18th century have swept away
traditional systems of domination by declaring that 'all men are
created equal'. This declaration of equal rights is a fundamental
political act - it is the political act in which the political
community creates itself in relation to traditional systems of
domination. But because it was generally assumed that the subject
of these rights is the individual human being, the political
community was subordinated to the individual. Marx discerned,
rightly, that this was the paradox at the heart of the declaration
of the rights of man. But while Marx was right to highlight this
paradox, his proposed solution does not provide us with a sound
basis for overcoming it. In this major new work, Christoph Menke
adopts a different approach: he argues that we can address and
overcome this paradox only by embarking on a fundamental inquiry
into the nature of rights. Rights are a specific configuration of
normativity: to have a right is to have a justified and binding
claim. But with the equal rights declared by modern revolutions,
rights assumed a particular form: the normative claim to equality
was combined with an assumption about the factual conditions of
social life. In this conception, society is the realm of private
individuals pursuing their interests, and private interests are
therefore seen as the natural basis for politics - what Menke calls
'the naturalization of the social'. By laying bare this conception
which lies at the basis of political literalism and modern law,
Menke is able to criticize and move beyond it, opening up a new way
of understanding rights that no longer involves the disempowering
of the political community. This radical critique of rights and of
modern law is a major contribution to critical theory and legal
theory and it will be of great interest to students and scholars in
social and political theory, philosophy and law.
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