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Review Essay - The Future of Human Rights? Theory and Practice in an International Context: Review of Upendra Baxi's The Future of Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Euan MacDonald

Abstract

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Type
European & International Law
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 8 , 01 August 2004 , pp. 969 - 984
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1966 Covenants on Civil and Political rights, on one hand, and Economic, Social and Cultural, on the other.Google Scholar

2 See, e.g. Ritter, “Human Rights”: Would You Recognize One if You Saw One? A Philosophical Hearing of International Rights Talk, 27 Ca Western Int'l L. J. 266 (1997).Google Scholar

3 Rabossi, , Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality, in On Human Rights (Shute & Hurley eds., 1993) available at http://www.usm.maine.edu/∼bcj/issues/three/rorty.html.Google Scholar

4 All italics in quotations are Baxi's, unless otherwise stated.Google Scholar

5 The three stages being abstract universality, abstract particularity and concrete universality. For one critique of the whole notion of “objective moments” that interact to produce the perfect synthesis of the Idea that presupposes them, see generally Marx, From the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), in Marx: Early Political Writings (1994).Google Scholar

6 See Knox, Foreword to Hegel, Philosophy of Right at ix (1952).Google Scholar

7 Rabossi, , supra note 3.Google Scholar

8 Id.Google Scholar

9 See, e.g., p. 87, where, in responding to postmodern critiques, Baxi notes: “No matter how flawed the Parisian and neo-Parisian cognitive fashions, human rights discourse furnishes potential for struggle which postmodernist discourse on the politics of identity as yet does not. These cognitive fashion parades may not be allowed to drain emergent solidarities in struggle unless the postmodernist antiessentialist critique demonstrates that human rights are a mistake.”Google Scholar

10 Rorty, , supra note 3, at 118.Google Scholar

11 Rorty, , The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture, 1 at http://www.stanford.edu/∼rrorty/decline.htm,.Google Scholar

12 Quoting Eco, Apocalypses Postponed 104 (1995).Google Scholar

13 See generally Rorty, supra note 3.Google Scholar

14 It is certainly true that, upon a superficial reading of many of his works, Rorty's tone may often lead one to the belief that he thinks the US has got it pretty much right in terms of human rights. This, however, should be seen in context. Often, his main target is the critical left in America, with whom he shares much in the way of philosophical assumptions, but who, he believes, are too slow to recognise some of the advantages and benefits of Western societies in general: see, e.g., Rorty, The Unpatriotic Academy, in Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope 252 (1999); However, in many other writings, he makes it clear that his philosophy of social hope is far from exhausted by the US model: see, e.g., Rorty; Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes, in Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope 201 (1999); Rorty, , supra note 3.Google Scholar

15 Rorty, , A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, 1 at http://www.stanford.edu/∼rrorty/pragmatistview.htm.Google Scholar

16 See generally, Rorty, supra note 3.Google Scholar

17 Rorty, , supra n. 3.Google Scholar

18 Id, at 6.Google Scholar

19 Id. at 12.Google Scholar

20 Carty, , Theory of/or Theory instead of/International Law, 8 Eur. J. of Int'l L. 181, 195 (1997).Google Scholar

21 See generally, Scobbie, Towards the Elimination of International Law: Some Radical Scepticism about Sceptical Radicalism, 61 British Ybk of Int'l L. 339 (1990).Google Scholar

22 See, e.g., Kennedy, When Renewal Repeats: Thinking Against the Box, 32 NYU. J. of Int'l L. and Pol. (2000)Google Scholar

23 Kennedy, , The Disciplines of International Law and Policy, 12 Leiden J. of Int.l L. 9, 34 (1999).Google Scholar

24 See, e.g., Koskenniemi, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and the Image of Law in International Relations, in The Role of Law in International Politics 17 (Byers ed., 2000); Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (2001). For a review of the latter in terms of a return to formalism, see Cryer, Déjà Vu in International Law, 65 Mod. L. Rev. 931, 941 (2000).Google Scholar

25 For an intriguing attempt to overcome the nihilist/wilful ignorance dichotomy, see Korhonen, New International Law: Silence, Defence or Deliverance?, 7 Eur. J. of Int'l L. 1, 28 (1996); By ‘Fortress’ Korhonen refers to a situation in which the flaws are explicitly recognised and in which international law continues as “relatively satisfactory,” with nothing better at hand. There is no space here to examine her solution, based on a reading of Plato's cave metaphor, except to say that for this author it fails to meet the standards of its own critique.Google Scholar

26 I have taken this phrase from Rorty, supra note 3.Google Scholar

27 On this, see generally, Boyle, Ideals and Things: International Legal Scholarship and the Prison-House of Language, 26 Harv. Int'l L. J. 327, 359 (1985).Google Scholar

28 Rorty, , supra n. 3.Google Scholar