2 - Dissent and the Politics of Human Rights

Summary

This chapter reconstructs the specific human rights language, or vernacular, of Polish dissent. Its central thesis is that Polish nonconformist intellectuals understood human rights in a profoundly political way. To support this thesis, this chapter analyzes the two main ideas of Polish human rights discourses: the dissidents’ interpretation of the concept of totalitarianism and the view that humans beings were simultaneously endowed with an inalienable dignity and enmeshed in social relations and cultural norms. On this basis, this chapter shows that Polish dissidents saw the issues that were usually associated with human rights work, e.g. defending one’s private sphere or protecting people from repression, asmeans to an end: the reclaiming of the public sphere from the totalitarian leviathan.Expressing an unalienable human dignity, human rights were seen as a means of breaking the totalitarian system’s grip on the public sphere by creating pockets of freedom where people could speak their minds freely and communicate with each other to tackle their shared concerns. In the discourse of the dissidents, human rights were understood not as antipolitical alternatives tovisions of social change or even to politics as such but as indissoluble linked to questions of collective agency and struggles for social justice.