Menschenrechte und Formanalyse. Zwischen materialistischer Kritik und emanzipatorischer Reformulierung
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
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Abstract
According to their literal meaning, human rights claim universal validity, as rights of all people that should enable them to be human in their social contexts. Human rights did not come into being in a straight line, but developed out of various historical struggles along social contradictions and power relations. What started with the emancipation of white, property-owning men from feudalism has since given rise to many emancipation movements and allowed these struggles to be concretely inscribed in what is defined as "being human". With the rise of the bourgeois-capitalist state, human rights have been transformed from rights based on natural law into positive law, thus taking on a new form.
Precisely because the human rights-concept is ubiquity today, it is necessary to analyze human rights from a critical perspective. The intention is to make a contribution from a materialistic point of view to the human rights discourses that have been emerging in recent decades, and yet, despite all criticism, to hold on to the human rights from an emancipatory claim. The central question is how their emergence in bourgeois-capitalist society limits them in their universality. However, the aim is also to illuminate their emancipatory potential, which lies in the politicization of oppression and domination. The work refers to the fundamental problem of how far materialistic, radical-emancipatory conceptions of society are strategically compatible with human rights. Precisely because Marx and Engels did not develop an independent concept of human rights, this question is a research gap in materialist scholarship, which few theorists have addressed so far. However, this work does not give a general overview of the discussion points of theories that consider themselves as Marxist, but provides a contribution to an independent materialist concept of human rights.
The chosen method is the dialectic of form and content in order to uncover the limits and contradictions of social forms and human rights content. "Form" is used in the Marxist sense as a broad structural concept. The importance is the historicization of social forms and thus the changeability of their (domination) structures. The analysis of the form of modern human rights is productive, because in this way, human rights, which are normally treated very abstractly, are reconnected with concrete historical dynamics and their violent enforcement becomes tangible. Therefore, the bourgeois forms of society, state, and law are analyzed in terms of their historical emergence and their impact on the concepts of freedom, equality, security, and property that underlie liberal human rights.
Following this critique of domination, it remains to justify why it can nevertheless be productive for radical-emancipatory social claims to adhere to the concept of human rights. It is explained that the common justification by human dignity is not sufficient, because it remains unspecific. The alternative justification of a materialistic conception of human rights can be derived from the general assumption of human beings as empathetic and social beings whose suffering from concrete, historical forms of social domination should be minimized. For the development of a materialist conception of human rights, it must be kept in mind that a fixed understanding of human rights prevents precisely such a movement along historical contexts that is necessary for an emancipatory orientation. To develop a materialist understanding of human rights is to conceptually transcend the changeable and individual needs of emancipatory struggles. Emancipation is not a fixed outcome of a linear process, but rather the result of specific historical struggles and their material condensations, an outgrowing of existing social forms.
The emancipatory orientation of the understanding of human rights as transcended needs also means recognizing that human rights cannot only criticize existing conditions that are inhumane. Contained in their critique is a striving toward structural changes that would materially realize human rights as the foundation of political practice. Here, a materialistic-emancipatory approach to human rights is connected to the utopian content of critical theory, because the transcended concepts of human rights are capable of being linked to subsequent struggles for emancipation and can thus be carried beyond their former societal frames of reference. Mediating human rights with utopian goals represents an attempt not to treat the utopian abstractly, but to fill it concretely and to renew the promise of a world in which human rights are materially realized.
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Created: 2022Issued: 2023-07-24Updated: 2023-07-24
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Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie
Publisher
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Language
ger
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MastersThesis
Keywords
MenschenrechtePropertyHuman RightsEqualityEigentumDominionDeclaration of Human RighFrench RevolutionEmanzipationDialecticsSecurityKritische TheorieFreiheitEmancipationSicherheitDialektikGleichheitCritical TheoryHerrschaftKarl MarxFranzösische RevolutionFreedom
DDC-Numbers
100
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Adam, Lisa: Menschenrechte und Formanalyse. Zwischen materialistischer Kritik und emanzipatorischer Reformulierung. : Philipps-Universität Marburg 2023-07-24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/ed.2023.0001.