291
291 292
292 293
293 294
294 360
295 361
296 362
297 363
298 364
299 365
300 366
301 367
302 368
303 369
304 370
305 371
306 372
307 373
308 374
309 375
310 376
311 377
312 378
Critique of Rights
Christoph Menke
Translated by Christopher Turner
polity
First published in German as Kritik der Rechte © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2015 This English edition © Polity Press, 2020
This publication was supported by the DFG funded Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2042-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Menke, Christoph, 1958- author.
Title: Critique of rights / Christoph Menke ; translated by Christopher Turner
Other titles: Kritik der Rechte. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The declaration of equal rights arguably created the modern political community. But this act of empowering individuals caused the disempowering of the political community. Exposing this, Menke opens up a new way of understanding rights that no longer involves the disempowering of the political community”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019024007 (print) | LCCN 2019024008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509520381 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509520398 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509520428 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Civil rights--Philosophy. | Liberalism.
Classification: LCC JC571 .M425513 2020 (print) | LCC JC571 (ebook) | DDC 323.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024007 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024008 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
MARX’S PUZZLE
The bourgeois revolutions that since the eighteenth century brought down the regimes of traditional domination [Herrschaft] are first of all declarations of equal rights: they declare the rights of the human being and of the citizen.1 Regimes of traditional domination were regimes of inequality. In such regimes, the power to exercise political judgment and rule was distributed in a radically unequal manner. In contrast, bourgeois revolutions establish equality, and to them equality signifies equal rights. Equality and equal rights amount to the same thing, in the revolutions’ view. However, they are not the same. Equality does not mean rights. Instead, equality of rights is a specific formal determination of equality. The decisive act of bourgeois revolutions is therefore not the decision in favor of equality. Rather, it is the decision to give equality the form of rights.
This decision is puzzling. In his analysis of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” Marx writes:
It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community…. This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being.2
According to Marx, the revolutionary declaration of equal rights is puzzling because of the contradiction in the subject, namely the antithesis between the political subject who declares rights and the social or private subject (the two are equivalent in civil society) who is authorized by rights, and thus between the basis and the content of rights. The declaration of rights is a political act; it is the political act. In declaring rights, the political community creates itself in opposition to regimes of traditional domination. Because politically declared rights authorize the apolitical (“egoistical”) human beings of civil society, however, the declaration of rights
