INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS: A SOCIAL THEORY OF RIGHT AND THE JURIDICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SUBJECT
INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS: A SOCIAL THEORY OF RIGHT AND THE JURIDICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SUBJECT

Summary/Abstract: Scholars across the humanities and social sciences talk of the “cosmopolitan turn” and in the field of educational philosophy the cosmopolitan ideal has been appealed to as a form of critical global awareness or the basis of global citizenship education. These accounts most often hinge on the meanings and metaphors buried in the original Greek concept that emphasizes a politically well-ordered citystate where citizens irrespective of religious, cultural or political affiliation belong to the same community (polis) on the same grounds of equal entitlements and obligations. Scholars have attempted to use the notion of cosmopolitanism as a benign form of globalization and to develop associated forms of learning based on cultivating its outlook and ideals. Most accounts track the discourse to the Stoics and trace its European genealogy in terms of Kant and the social democratic tradition inspired by Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson. Part of the appeal of cosmopolitanism for most theorists is its assumption of moral universalism, though some commentators also are aware of the dangers of abstract principles that mask a eurocentrism of values and take the place of an analysis anchored in the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world. The paper employs Foucault’s method of “problematization”as a means to investigate a social history of right and the juridical construction of the subject.

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