Lacroix Justine - Human Rights in History: Human Rights on Trial

This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights today. With an open-ended chronology and international perspective, the series seeks works attentive to the surprises and contingencies in the historical origins and legacies of human rights ideals and interventions. Books in the series will focus not only on the intellectual antecedents and foundations of human rights, but also on the incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states, international governance, and transnational law.

A full list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/human-rights-history

Human Rights on Trial

A Genealogy of the Critique of Human Rights

Justine Lacroix

Universit libre de Bruxelles

Jean-Yves Pranchre

Universit libre de Bruxelles

Translated by Gabrielle Maas

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Originally published in 2016 by Editions du Seuill as Le Procs des droits de lhomme: Gnalogie du scepticisme dmocratique , written in the French language by Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchre (ISBN 9782021181005)

Editions du Seuil 2016

First published in English by Cambridge University Press in 2018, translation by Gabrielle Maas.

Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchre 2018

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We gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Research Council, which funded this book with a Starting Grant entitled RESIST. Human Rights versus Democracy? Towards a Conceptual Genealogy of Skepticism about Human Rights in Contemporary Political Thought (20102016). The Centre de thorie politique (CTP) at the Universit libre de Bruxelles, our home institution, has provided us with an exceptionally inspiring and collegial working environment. The authors would like to thank all past and current CTP members, and in particular Christopher Hamel and Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti for their commitment to the RESIST project.

An earlier version of draws on arguments first explored in Justine Lacroix, The Right to Have Rights and French Political Philosophy. Conceptualising a Cosmopolitan Citizenship with Arendt, Constellations. An International Journal of Democratic and Critical Theory , 22/1, 2015, pp. 7990. We would like to thank the editors of both journals for granting permission to develop these ideas further here.

Many colleagues have generously shared their ideas and time with us: Julie Allard, Sarah Al Matary, Carolina Armenteros, Isabelle Aubert, Catherine Audard, Serge Audier, Etienne Balibar, Olivier Beaud, Thomas Berns, Samuel Chambers, Bertrand Binoche, Antoon Braeckman, Emmanuelle Bribosia, Frdric Brahami, Bruno Bernardi, Louis Carr, Manuel Cervera-Marzal, Anne-Sophie Chambost, Vronique Champeil-Desplats, Francis Cheneval, Antoine Chollet, Laurent Clauzade, Jean Cohen, Catherine Colliot-Thlne, Juliette Corsy, Philippe Crignon, Ludivine Damay, Robert Damien, Martin Deleixhe, Florence Delmotte, Isabelle Delpla, Helder De Schutter, Alexandre Escudier, Jean-Marc Ferry, Rainer Forst, Stphanie Francq, Michael Freeden, Marie Gaille, Antoine Garapon, Raf Geenens, Raphal Gely, Pierre Glaudes, Florent Gunard, Sophie Gurard de la Tour, Axel Gosseries, Ayten Gndogdu, Michel Hastings, Bonnie Honig, James Ingram, Engin Isin, Bruno Karsenti, Jean-Franois Kervgan, Jan Kleinheisterkamp, Michael Kohlhauer, Ccile Laborde, Pieter Lagrou, Arnaud Leclercq, Annabelle Lever, Alain Loute, Lois McNay, Kalypso Nicoladis, Samuel Hayat, Murray Hunt, James Ingram, La Ipy, Pierre Manent, John Milbank, Nobutaka Miura, Samuel Moyn, Janie Plabay, Anne Philipps, Arnd Pollman, Alain Policar, Jean-Claude Poizat, Olivier Rmaud, Isabelle Rorive, Pierre Rosanvallon, Denis Salas, Andrew Schaap, Diogo Sardinha, Rjane Snac, Cline Spector, Tristan Storme, Etienne Tassin, Andr Tosel, Bernadette Tulkens, Franoise Tulkens, Yannick Vanderborght, Philippe Van Parijs, Hajime Yamamoto and Patrick Weil, as well as our students at the Universit libre de Bruxelles, Universit Saint-LouisBruxelles, Sciences Po Paris and Sciences Po Lille. Our thanks go to all.

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Few political theorists, of course, would endorse rejection of human rights as such of the normative and legislative corpus, in other words, that forms the basis for the rule of law in democratic states. Likewise, there are few critics who would contest the inclusion of declarations of rights in the legal framework of the republican state. Yet the apparent consensus that has made human rights a dominant discourse of the last forty years has not prevented the development of a parallel critical argument which sets out to expose the ambiguities that consensus may conceal.