Abstract
This paper adds a new perspective to recent debates about the political nature of rights through attention to their distinctive role within social movement practices of moral critique and social struggle. The paper proceeds through a critical examination of the Political Constitutionalist theories of rights politics proposed by Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy. While political constitutionalists are correct to argue that rights are ‘contestable’ and require democratic justification, they construe political activity almost exclusively with reference to voting, parties and parliamentary law-making, neglecting the vital role rights play in political struggle outside and against the official institutions of democratic citizenship. In contrast to the political constitutionalist stress on the patient and reciprocal negotiation of rights within formal electoral processes, this paper locates the political nature of rights in their conflictual logic as ‘claims’ in multiple spheres that function to mobilise oppositional support against powerful adversaries and challenge dominant understandings. An activist citizenship of rights is frequently necessary, it argues, given the structural barriers of power and inequality that distort legislative decision-making and lead to the denial of fundamental moral entitlements to less powerful groups. The paper provides an illustration of activist citizenship taken from a contemporary squatting movement centred around the right to housing, Take Back the Land. In exercising the moral right to housing, for which they demand political recognition, through the occupation of vacant buildings, the practices of Take Back the Land reflect the conflictual dimension of rights as claims in keeping with their historical role in empowering subordinate groups to challenge unjust relations of power and inequality.
Highlights
There has been a trend in the recent philosophical literature on rights to argue that, in the absence of any authoritative stipulation of our moral entitlements – a stipulation derived from natural law, metaphysical reflection or some foundational moral theory, say – the concept of rights is inescapably ‘political’
Recognition of the importance of activist citizenship entails more than a straightforward empirical point about the historical contribution of social movements to the realisation of rights in democratic societies: it bears on our understanding of the nature of the concept and the role it plays in our politics
The foregoing examination of an activist politics of rights points to a different way of construing their political role; one which accounts for the practices of adversarial critique and struggle that have been a central means by which hierarchical social orders have been challenged and reconfigured since the origins of modern rights discourse
Summary
The political constitutionalist commitment to parliamentary decision-making stems from a particular account of the conceptual nature of rights as democratic claims addressed to others within a shared political community. The political constitutionalist account focuses on a single dimension of power in the form of legislative decision-making, implicitly assuming a smooth translation between citizens’ undistorted preferences with respect to rights and the votes of their representatives Their approach overlooks less visible and more insidious dimensions of power, which allow social and economic elites to shape the decision-making agenda of the legislature through such means as lobbying, party finance and campaign groups, while indirectly manipulating public discourse and the preferences of voters through control over the media, education and cultural and social institutions.[38] It is precisely these subtle and more pervasive power relations critical theorists call attention to when they argue that today’s dominant discourse of liberal rights masks an inherent ideological bias towards the capitalist free market and the interests of private property.[39] Here, the threat to rights is not so much the tyranny of the majority, but the tyranny of the minority: the domination of non-mobilised citizens by elites acting in their own interests. I develop an activist account of rights politics attentive to these political realities
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
