Exam Flashcards
“But it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.”
Hannah Arendt
“Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as a man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.”
Hannah Arendt
“We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.”
Hannah Arendt
“Human rights activism is a moral-political project
and if it displaces, competes with, refuses, or rejects other political projects, including those also aimed at producing justice,
then it is not merely a tactic but a particular form of political power carrying a particular image of justice,
and it will behoove us to inspect, evaluate, and judge it as such.”
Wendy Brown
“Rights, especially those as dependent on a universal moral vocabulary as human rights are, hardly guarantee local political deliberation about how we should live together; indeed, they may function precisely to limit or cancel such deliberation with transcendental moral claims, refer it to the courts, submit it to creeds of tolerance, or secure an escape from it into private lives.”
Wendy Brown
“unsettle the imaginative geography of intervention, according to which the international community is absent from the scene of violence and suffering until it intervenes as a heroic saviour
Anne Orford
“It is by no means sufficient to investigate: Who should emancipate? Who is to be emancipated? Criticism had to investigate a third question. It had to inquire: What kind of emancipation is in question? What conditions follow from the very nature of the emancipation that is demanded?”
Marx
“Thus none of the so-called rights of men goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species-being … [society] appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons.”
Marx
“Thus man was not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property. He received freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade but received freedom to trade.”
Marx
“Political emancipation is indeed a great step forward. It is not, to be sure, the final form of universal human emancipation, but it is the final form within the prevailing order of things.”
Marx
“Under official policy of white supremacy, there is no tension between an abstract, formally identical personhood and the various social institutions and practices that mark people of colour as outside the social contract.”
Charles Miller
“Whereas lynching visibly marked the bodies of its victims as black and so reconsolidated the color line…key elements of the contemporary practice of capital punishment veil that line, and so render its contribution to racial subordination more difficult to apprehend and so to contest.”
Kaufman-Osborn
“The conclusion of this study was an unexpected one: human rights as we understand them were born yesterday. Human rights crystallized in the moral consciousness of people only in the 1970s…chiefly as a result of widespread disappointment with earlier, hitherto more inspirational forms of idealism that were failing.
In other words, human rights emerged as the last utopia, but not from scratch: they appeared only after other, perhaps more inspiring utopias failed.”
Moyn
“Today, re-creation of the racial contract in the United States requires ongoing negotiation of the tension between the social contract’s formally colour-blind principles and the colour-coded practices, which, although necessary to white superordination, must now do their work in a state of relative (but not complete) invisibility.
Kaufman-Osborn
“If the racial contract creates its signatories, those party to the contract, by constructing them as ‘white persons,’ it also tries to make its victims, the objects of the contract into the ‘non-white subpersons’ it specifies.”
Charles Mills
