What is wrong with human rights?

Abstract

The modern state in ordering social life aims only at granting “human rights” and all “rule of action” is now-days but an obstacle to the free realization of individual desires. Pierre Manent looks into human rights theories and sees at its core a Hobbesian lawless world. His work redraws the relationship between the modern state and rights but departs from the authors who influenced him the most in two ways. It minimizes the “novelty” of human rights in the 20th century by ignoring the “third wave of modernity” that leads present charts of human rights to dispense all justifications (God, Nature, Reason); the criterion of conformity of a regime with natural law is inferred from a set of motifs that pervade all action, minimizing the role of uncertainty, hic et nunc, to which both Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss were sensitive. It is probably Manent’s most ambitious and original work.