Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times
The language of human rights has become
the public vocabulary of our contemporary world. Ironically, as the political
influence of human rights has grown, their philosophical justification has
become ever more controversial.
Building on a theory of discourse ethics and communicative rationality, this
book addresses the politics and philosophy of human rights against the
background of the broader social transformations that are shaping the modern
world. Rejecting the reduction of international human rights to the Trojan horse
of a neo-liberal empire's bid for world power, as well as the conservative
objections to legal cosmopolitanism as encroachments upon democratic
sovereignty, Benhabib develops two key concepts to move beyond these false
antitheses. International human rights norms need contextualization in specific
polities through processes of what she calls 'democratic iterations.'
Furthermore, such norms have a 'jurisgenerative power,' in that they enable new
actors to enter fields of social and political contestation; they promote new
vocabularies for public claim-making and anticipate a justice to come.
