Rights and Ideology. Individual Rights From the Perspective of Critical Legal and Social Theory (Some Remarks)

Abstract

The topic of fundamental rights is crucial from the perspective of contemporary social and legal thought. The triumph of fundamental rights can even be referred to as one of the indicators of philosophical modernity. The mainstream approach to fundamental rights is unequivocally optimistic and affirmative. According to this vision, humanity, following Kant's injunction sapere aude, discovered/created and is creatively developing a historically optimal set of normative indicators of functioning for individuals and groups. Author prefers different visions of fundamental rights. His aim is to interpret in a generalising manner the approach to individual rights in critical legal and social thought. He understands the latter as a set of emancipatory discourses, the juridical local variation of which is the Critical Legal Studies movement, not only in its American version, but also in its European version (encompassing various gender and queer theories, post-colonial theories, critical sociology, communication theories, post-humanist theories). The direct intertextual genealogy of various rules adopted by those discourses leads back to the so-called “French theory”, i.e. the thought of French post-structuralists, in particular Michel Foucault and to the programmes of critical theory elaborated by the Frankfurt School.