Ideology in Modern Times: Three Ideological Lies Behind Universal Human Rights

Abstract

Originally formulated by Francois Fukuyama, today’s views of the end of ideology and final domination of liberal democracy appear to be both inadequate and naive in regard to the current political situation. The main aim of this paper is to investigate whether modern times may truly be described as post-ideological and post-political and if no, why that is. The material for this study, the concept of human rights, a crucial foundation of liberal democracies, will serve as a reference. To be able to achieve this goal, I will try to reconstruct two famous concepts of ideology present in the literature from the twentieth century. Slavoj Žižek’s critique on Marx’s view on ideology will serve as a starting point to these reflections. I will the show how the two opposing views on ideology are epitomized in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. To be able to conduct a comprehensive analysis of universal human rights, I will need to bring in my papers term of the political by Chantal Mouffe. Moving to human rights, the hypothesis that I will try to prove is that in ‘universal human rights’, there are at least as many lies as there are words from which this term is derived. This will lead to the conclusion that human rights prove that our times are, on the one hand, highly ideological and, on the other, post-political.