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Critique of Rights
Christoph Menke
Translated by Christopher Turner
polity
First published in German as Kritik der Rechte © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2015 This English edition © Polity Press, 2020
This publication was supported by the DFG funded Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2042-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Menke, Christoph, 1958- author.
Title: Critique of rights / Christoph Menke ; translated by Christopher Turner
Other titles: Kritik der Rechte. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The declaration of equal rights arguably created the modern political community. But this act of empowering individuals caused the disempowering of the political community. Exposing this, Menke opens up a new way of understanding rights that no longer involves the disempowering of the political community”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019024007 (print) | LCCN 2019024008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509520381 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509520398 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509520428 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Civil rights--Philosophy. | Liberalism.
Classification: LCC JC571 .M425513 2020 (print) | LCC JC571 (ebook) | DDC 323.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024007 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024008 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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MARX’S PUZZLE
The bourgeois revolutions that since the eighteenth century brought down the regimes of traditional domination [Herrschaft] are first of all declarations of equal rights: they declare the rights of the human being and of the citizen.1 Regimes of traditional domination were regimes of inequality. In such regimes, the power to exercise political judgment and rule was distributed in a radically unequal manner. In contrast, bourgeois revolutions establish equality, and to them equality signifies equal rights. Equality and equal rights amount to the same thing, in the revolutions’ view. However, they are not the same. Equality does not mean rights. Instead, equality of rights is a specific formal determination of equality. The decisive act of bourgeois revolutions is therefore not the decision in favor of equality. Rather, it is the decision to give equality the form of rights.
This decision is puzzling. In his analysis of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” Marx writes:
It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish