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Rights, World‐Society and the Crisis of Legal Universalism*
Author(s) -
BELVISI FRANCESCO
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
ratio juris
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1467-9337
pISSN - 0952-1917
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9337.1996.tb00226.x
Subject(s) - universalism , politics , rationality , enlightenment , sovereignty , multiculturalism , political science , individualism , presupposition , state (computer science) , injustice , sociology , law , law and economics , environmental ethics , epistemology , philosophy , algorithm , computer science
. The universalism of rights is a corollary to the individualistic semantics of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the grounds of universalism were those legal and political concepts that theoretically describe the 19th century nation‐state (such as sovereignty of the people, citizenship, rights, and the like). All these concepts of the liberal tradition construct the nation‐state on the presupposition of a highly homogeneous political community of rational subjects, whose homogeneity consists in the very social, economic, political and sexual conditions of their rationality. This kind of legal and political semantics is no longer adequate to characterize contemporary society which is a multicultural, highly in‐homogeneous world‐society. It no longer incorporates an ethic which is able to enforce universal leading values for human action.