Dialectical snares: human rights and democracy in the world society

Abstract

The paper starts with a thesis on the dialectical structure of modern law that goes back to the European revolutionary tradition and constitutes a legal structure that is at once emancipatory and repressive. Once it became democratic, the modern nation state has solved more or less successfully the crises that have emerged in modern Europe since the 16th Century. Yet, this state did not escape the dialectical snares of modern law and modern legal regimes. It's greatest advance, the exclusion of inequalities, presupposed the exclusion of the internal other of blacks, workers, women, etc., and the other that stemmed from the non-European world that furthermore was under European colonial rule or other forms of European, North American, or Japanese imperial control. Yet, the wars and revolutions of the 20th Century led to a complete reconstruction, new foundation, and globalization of all national and international law. The evolutionary advance of the 20th Century was the emergence of world law, and this enabled the construction of international and national welfarism and the global expansion of the exclusion of inequalities. Nevertheless, the dialectic of enlightenment returned and led to new forms of post-national domination, hegemony, oppression, and exclusion. The final section of the paper tries to detect some ideas and principles for how to overcome the crisis.

Social Phenomenology as a Factor of Self-organization of Democracy

“…Democracy is a complex socio-political phenomenon, and therefore, to it scientists take apologetic (Sen 1999;Brunkhorst 2009; Ginsburg et al 2018), or critical position (Zakaras 2010;Hobson 2015;Khmil 2016;Prendergast 2019). That is, democracy, despite its constructive potential in the arrangement of social relations based on the principles of equality, justice and freedom, has some flaws.…”