The solidarity of rights and responsibilities

Abstract

This is the concluding chapter of the book. Prior to this chapter, there has been an examination of human rights, including their natural rights’ foundations, as well as the responsibilities and duties arising from rights. There has been an analysis of critical legal theory, as well as an analysis of a multitude of criticisms of rights from a range of critical perspectives, such as Marxism, critical legal studies, feminism and critical race theory. However, the aim of this book is to present a defence of human rights, so it has been incumbent to ‘rehabilitate’ rights within the tradition of critical legal theory. Following a rehabilitation of rights, this chapter grounds freedoms within the spirit of a political community of rights-holders and duty-bearers. But some political communities have been far from progressive eg. Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, philosophically, the political communities of, say, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Jeremy Bentham etc hardly attached much weight to individual rights either. A possible compromise between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective resides in, say, Alan Gewirth. Gewirth is particularly interesting because he wrote a book called The Community of Rights, in 1996. But is Gewirth maybe too focused on individual autonomy? That said, his ideas have caught the attention of critical scholars. Perhaps, to navigate ourselves out of this liberal ‘impasse’, we simply adopt ‘solidarity’ as the rallying call? Solidarity has influenced the writing of (in the author’s opinion) Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emile Durkheim and surely describes the type of progressive, political community of rights-holders and duty-bearers which the author wants to convey. And, more importantly, following the writings of Roberto Unger, the choice of solidarity is directly compatible with critical legal theory. This is the final conclusion of the book.