Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason - Rilegato

Manent, Pierre

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0268107211 ISBN 13: 9780268107215

Casa editrice: Univ of Notre Dame Pr, 2020

Riassunto

This first English translation of Pierre Manent’s profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition. In six chapters, developed from the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and in a related appendix, Manent contemplates the steady displacement of the natural law by the modern conception of human rights. He aims to restore the grammar of moral and political action, and thus the possibility of an authentically political order that is fully compatible with liberty. Manent boldly confronts the prejudices and dogmas of those who have repudiated the classical and Christian notion of “liberty under law” and in the process shows how groundless many contemporary appeals to human rights turn out to be. Manent denies that we can generate obligations from a condition of what Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau call the “state of nature,” where human beings are absolutely free, with no obligations to others. In his view, our ever-more-imperial affirmation of human rights needs to be reintegrated into what he calls an “archic” understanding of human and political existence, where law and obligation are inherent in liberty and meaningful human action. Otherwise we are bound to act thoughtlessly and in an increasingly arbitrary or willful manner. Natural Law and Human Rights will engage students and scholars of politics, philosophy, and religion, and will captivate sophisticated readers who are interested in the question of how we might reconfigure our knowledge of, and talk with one another about, politics.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Pierre Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of numerous books, including Montaigne: Life without Law (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

Ralph C. Hancock is professor of political science at Brigham Young University.

Daniel J. Mahoney is the Augustinian Boulanger Chair and professor of political science at Assumption College.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

As we observe human beings who obey the rule of their culture, even the most absurd or shocking in our view, we understand that they are not free and that there is no law valid for all human beings, a law that they would be free to obey or to disobey. We understand at the same time that we can and we must practically order collective life not according to a natural law, which does not exist or in any case has no power, but by taking as our foundation a freedom to which all human beings are entitled and of which they are capable once we have renounced imposing some law on them, once we have resolved to concern ourselves exclusively with their “rights.”

This division of the mind between human rights that we must put into effect and the diverse cultures that we are obliged to declare equal entails uncertainty and finally a weakness of judgment. Caught between the diversity without rule of cultures on the one hand, and, on the other, the lawless freedom of human rights, we no longer have a solid basis for exercising practical judgment. The arrangement that brings together the affirmation of the equality of human rights and the affirmation of the equality of “cultures” or ways of life throws the faculty of judgment into an insurmountable perplexity that tends to paralyze collective action.

Thus laws that are exotic or barbarous and our limitless freedom come together on this point: the former implicitly refute and the latter explicitly rejects the idea of a natural law, that is, the idea of freedom under law – under a law not made by freedom but that finds its support and its reason in human nature. The argument that the philosophy of human rights is constituted in opposition to the idea of a natural law, and particularly in opposition to the way this idea developed in a Christian context, finds sufficient proof in the philosophical construction that was the basis and the matrix of the doctrine of the rights of man, that is, the notion of the state of nature. The Christian or biblical idea of humanity as beginning under the law and, whether obedient or disobedient, as remaining under the law, is replaced by that of a humanity that begins in a freedom that ignores all law and that, once forced by necessity to give itself laws, will do so only under the condition and with the intention of preserving its freedom whole without law: the modern citizen, by putting himself under the law that it has produced, means to remain, according to the formula of Rousseau’s Social Contract, “just as free as before.” In other words, the law henceforth has validity or legitimacy only if it aims to guarantee human rights and limits itself to this purpose.

One might argue that, although the philosophy of human rights was elaborated and refined in a Christian context in opposition to the philosophy or doctrine of natural law nourished in this context, these conditions surrounding its production, which it is easy to show from the history of philosophy were intensely polemical, take nothing from the intrinsic legitimacy of this philosophy. The idea of an original condition of freedom and equality in which the rights of man are rooted seems at first to offer enough consistency and meaning, enough clarity and motivation, for the citizen to be able and even obliged to forget the history of philosophy. No doubt the idea of human rights speaks to us directly and powerfully enough that we do not feel the need to inquire concerning its genesis. Still, even if we consider the notion of the state of nature to be scaffolding that is no longer needed once the edifice of rights has been constructed, a little attention to the stones of this edifice will force us to admit that we cannot speak of human rights without referring implicitly but directly and concretely to “nature.” And however repugnant we may find it to consider that “nature” in any sense plays a role in the principles by which we organize the human world, we must concede that the modern doctrine of rights depends upon a specific understanding of the human being that is nothing if not “natural.” The doctrine of human rights derives from a “right” that is nothing if not “natural.”

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Notre Dame Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2020
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0268107211
• ISBN 13: 9780268107215
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 149
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile