Cosmopolitan entitlements. The construction and constitution of human beings as human rights subjects

Abstract

The framework of human rights is becoming increasingly central to perceptions of global problems and to demands for transnational solidarity. At the same time, human rights are an object of criticism. In both cases, the term “human rights” is often used with a strong normative and essentialist bias. When viewed through the lens of a sociology of knowing, it proves to be based on implicit, unexamined assumptions. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct these assumptions and to clarify the social meaning of – and need for – human rights in a reflexive, cosmopolitan modernity; it investigates the construction and constitution of human beings as human rights subjects. What makes an individual a human being in the sense in which the term is used in the symbolic language of human rights? What conception of the human (and hence of the social) is inscribed in the patterns of thought, feeling and action underlying the framework of human rights? I argue that the human rights subject represents an ultimate status category and transnational figure of knowledge. It is a post-heroic subject, determined and defined by cosmopolitan entitlements: the ontological state of vulnerability, the cultural primacy of dignity and the fragility of human existence.

Keywords:

• Human rights subject
• human rights culture
• global problems
• vulnerability
• dignity
• reflexive modernization
• cosmopolitanization

Notes

1. This approach is inspired by the sociology of knowledge developed by Berger and Luckmann (1966), communicative constructivism (Keller, Knoblauch, & Reichertz, 2013), symbolic interactionism and frame analysis (see section 2).

2. I am grateful to Haideh Moghissi for pointing out that there is a decisive difference here between having and claiming rights.

3. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, by way of contrast with Talcott Parsons’s work on this topic, emphasize the transformative potential of the concept of institutionalized individualism and the related theorem of individualization.

4. The literature on human rights often distinguishes between “strong” and “weak” or “moral” and “legal” dimensions of human rights. Bobbio (1999), by contrast, prefers to distinguish between “demands” and (enforceable) “rights”.

5. Frames are defined by Goffman as “schemata of interpretation” that render “what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful” and which allow individuals “to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms” (1986, p. 21). With regard to collective processes cf. Snow and Benford (2000).

6. Cosmopolitan approaches derived from the theory of reflexive modernization exhibit many similarities to neoinstitutionalist world society theories (Meyer, 2010; cf. Koenig, 2015) and theories of world society based on systems theory (cf. Japp, 2015). However, there are also important differences that merit discussion, for example in relation to neoinstitutionalist ideas about the diffusion of global norms or systems theory’s conception of inclusion/exclusion; for reasons of space, it is not possible to explore these differences here.