Human Rights, Legal Democracy, and Populism

Abstract

This chapter engages with the emergence of human rights as a new or even last ‘utopia’ in understanding of human rights as a relatively novel core part—and raison d’etre—of modern democratic societies. Historians understand the emergence of human rights as an ‘agenda-setting topic’ and, as part of an increasingly popular political imagination and set of claims, as an intrinsic dimension of a complex period of change—the ‘long 1970s. Human rights had ‘serious political and social momentum’ in wake of two world wars. A human rights narrative became a significant marker of democratic and democratising societies. In fact, the clamorous revival of the idea of human rights identifies a significant intellectual turning point inside of the republique des lettres and in the circle of old militants: a new orientation. The chapter concludes with Gauchet’s powerful depiction of ‘legal democracy’ and his assessment of the negative impact of human rights on collective political projects (leading to populism trying to ‘fill the void’).