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Reflections on Human Rights

In the 1980s and 1990s, human rights became the implicit or explicit moral and political horizon of Western democracies. 1989 can be regarded as the turning point: the bicentennial of the French Revolution coincided with the collapse of the Soviet system, i.e., of the last grand alternative to market democracy in the Northern hemisphere.

This disappearance of "really existing communism" was preceded in the 1970s by the spiritual dissolution of the communist ideal. At that time, under the supervisory (and media-generated) figure of the "dissident," the Western intelligentsia abandoned the scientific and revolutionary pretenses of critical and socio-historical theories in...