Hayek's Critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (original) (raw)

Human Rights According to Marxism

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2008

Marxism sees liberal individualist freedoms as a step up from feudalism but not as the end of historical development. Marxism defends not just negative "freedoms from" (procedural justice) but also affirmative "rights to" (claims). However, rights are contextualized in Marxism by the logic of socialist development rather than capitalism. Thus rights are collective, social, relative and substantive rather than individual, absolute and procedural. The Marxist critique of fundamental rights and freedoms is a dialectic between first and second generation rights. This article presents a detailed explanation of the Marxist conception of human rights and critique of capitalist individual freedoms. Rights and freedoms are best seen not as conflicting but as complementing each other.

The Communist Manifesto and the Problem of Universality

Monthly Review, 1998

One can say without fear of refutation that the Manifes. 0 has been more consequential in the actual making of thm odem world than any other piece of political writing, be t Rousseau's Social Contract, the American Constitution and thB ill of Rights, or the French "Declaration of the Rights of Mai l and the Citizen." The first reason is, of course, the power of it; political message, which has reverberated throughout the worl«l and determined the destinies of a large cross-section of humanity over the past one hundred fifty years. Then there is the styliĩ tself: no call to arms has ever been phrased in a language 0s uch zest, beauty, and purity. Third, there is the stunning combination of diagnosis am prediction. Marx describes the capitalism of his own times am predicts its trajectories into the indefinite future with such force and accuracy that every subsequent generation, in various pan.

On the Marxist Critique of Human Rights

Which critique of human rights do you find most convincing, if any? (Refer to at least one of Marxism or utilitarianism) The Marxist critique of human rights is the most convincing. To understand Marx's perspective on human rights we must understand the context within which Marx and Engels were writing, before we can see how the Marxist critique. The bulk of Marx's critique is taken from parts of his early writings, in the mid-1840s, with some further development in the late 1870s. Marx was writing at a time of turmoil within the European empires. Aristocratic rule was being toppled by the growing bourgeois class, through their uniting with the working and peasant classes. In turn, the bourgeois governments were being challenged by risings of the working and peasant classes.

How to believe in human rights (if you are Marxist)

Democracy, Human Rights and Global Justice, ed. by Marta Nunes da Costa, pp. 67-78, 2013

It has been argued that Marxists cannot believe in human rights because human rights presuppose individual conflicts of interests, which according to Marx are not intrinsic to human nature, but features of alienation, which is ultimately due to the capitalistic mode of production. Only the overcoming of capitalism, not human rights, will lead to human emancipation - what Marxism is finally for. I have tried to show that the international doctrine of human rights can be made hospitable to Marxism and Marxism can be made hospitable to the international doctrine of human rights. More precisely, at least one interpretation of the international doctrine of human rights, namely Charles Beitz’s, is hospitable to Marxism because it does not view human rights as atemporally valid.

Answering the Critics- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights .docx

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established liberalism as the fundamental governing philosophy for states around the world. Prior to this document, critics of liberalism insisted that liberalism does not comport with all cultures or nationalities and could not be universalized. Yet having passed the United Nation’s General Assembly without a single vote against, the authors of this document seemed to have accomplished the impossible. How did they meet their critics and win them over? This paper reviews arguments made during the drafting process that illuminate both the key struggles and hard fought solutions that answer that question.

The Marxist critic of human rights

In the present essay we intend to address the issue of human rights from a Marxist perspective. Looking to Marxist theory, and since Marx's manuscripts, in " On the Jewish Question " written in 1843 and published in 1844, is denoted a severe criticism of humans rights, as defined after the French Revolution of 1789. For that we will discuss Marx's theories and later it will be made a more current analysis of Marxist theories, based on the writings of Slavoj Zizek. Marx's central ideas are discussed around the concept of 'selfish man'; how human rights serve nothing more than the maintenance and legitimation of the right to property, making them paradoxical. Zizek's analysis is very focused on the post-Cold War reality, and in particular on NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia. In his writings he deconstructs the idea that military intervention would have altruistic purposes, with the aim of helping local people. For that he questions the universality of human rights, and states that these are nothing more than a weapon created by the superstructure, as a way to keep their interests and justify external intervention.

Marx's outlook on human rights

Being far from a naturalist, Marx would often view the rights of men as something that “predicated to a large degree on bourgeois categories of possessive individualism and the free market” . In fact, his ideas that all rights of men, whether they are cultural, political, economic or liberal rights, are all just claims for powers by competing social groups and such rights are “continually transformed as the result of struggles over political, symbolic or economic resources within a state and transnational context” . This essay will attempt to provide the reader with an outline of Marx’s believes regarding human rights, followed by a number of the biggest critiques of the Marxist theories affecting human rights.