Or are we human beings?

See ➝

See ➝

Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton University Press, 2003).

The Face of Human Rights, eds. Walter Kälin, Lars Müller, Judith Wyttenbach (Lars Müller Publishers, 2004), 21.

"The squeeze on Assad," The Economist (30 June 2011), ➝

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Press, 2007).

Ibid. Hunt, 18–19.

Ibid. Hunt, 132.

Ibid. Hunt, 145, 147.

Ibid. Hunt, 147, 151. Hunt’s frequent critic Samuel Moyn underlines the power of this argument: “Hunt is most inter­ested in what she repeatedly calls the cascading logic of human rights, whereby those who announced rights were compelled to extend them to Jews, blacks and women (or at least to consider doing so). And when groups initially excluded from humanity were not brought into the fold, as Hunt points out, they sometimes forced the issue. Early feminists like Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft declared the rights of women, while slaves in the French Caribbean demanded liberation.” Samuel Moyn, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” The Nation (16 April 2007), ➝.

Ibid. Hunt, 149–50, 166, 171. Napoleon reestablished slavery in the colonies in 1802, which lasted until 1844.

Ibid. Hunt, 175, 212.

Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 13.

Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 38.