Rethinking the Politics of Human Rights and Democracy with and beyond Lefort

Abstract

Standard wisdom has it that rights and democracy are both analytically distinct and in conflict with each other. Throughout the 19th century up to our day, liberals (political or economic) have advocated the rights of man, to protect the individual from arbitrary government. They frame human rights as universal moral principles that, together with general rule of law principles, constitutionalism, the separation of powers, and so on, secure individual liberty against both autocracy and democracy. Indeed, the point of constitutionalizing human rights is to limit government (executives and legislatures) by taking the most basic personal interests or concerns out of the domain of politics so that they can function as trumps.¹ Rights limit what democratic majorities in power can do. They are matters of principle, as Dworkin famously had it, while democracy is about preferences, majority interests, and opinions that steer the exercise of state power.² In other words, unlike the rights of man, democracy involves politics in the sense of aggregating an electoral majority out of the clash of particular interests, in the sense of policy making and in the sense of governing and using state power to enforce collectively binding decisions.