Beyond Human Rights [antikvár]

FOREWORD Summurn ius, summa injuria.^ There is, perhaps, no other area of law where Ciceros saying (well-known to all lovers of dictionaries of quotations) is more applicable than human rights. In the name of humanity, the Empire of Good will bomb Belgrade, Baghdad or Tripoli, foment colour revolutions in former Soviet states, set the Maghreb and the Near East ablaze, and seek to universally impose its fundamentalist conception of democracy Squads of businessmen dispatched by corporations will follow the ideological bulldozers driven by the evangelists. How many times have popular revolutions been hijacked by social benefactors chiefly interested in serving the interests of the people behind them? Already in the late 1970s —with the onset of the second wave of globalisation —the philosopher Marcel Gauchet observed how the defence of human rights had been turned into a substitution policy.^ This metamorphosis has continued: from politics, one has moved on to religion, so much so that today—as Alain de Benoist observes in the present volume — 'it is as unseemly, blasphemous and shocking to criticise the ideology of human rights as it once was to doubt the existence of God'. In this context, works critical of human rights — meaning works wTitten in a critical spirit — can only be beneficial. With the eyes of a lynx, at the beginning of this transformation, Michel Villey had set Latin: 'the extreme law is the greatest injustice'. From Cicero, 'On Duties' book one, chapter 33.-Ed. Marcel Gauchet, 'Les droits de l'homme ne sont pas une politique', ni Le Débat, no. 3, July-August 1980, pp. 2-21; reprinted in La démocratie contre elle-meme (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). -9-