Liberal Rights Between Radical Democratic Critique and Liberal Failure

Abstract

This article departs from the claim that the fading respect for rights is the most troublesome feature of the current condition of liberal democracy. A background assumption is that democracy is not a value in itself. Constitutional democracy is a legitimate political arrangement only if it effectively upholds and protects personal autonomy of its citizens. The focus of the text is on the radical democratic critique of liberal rights, but it does not aim at offering a comprehensive overview of diverse radical democratic theories. It is organized around the points of contestation between radical democratic and liberal constitutionalist readings of rights. The second section of the article summarizes the concept of radical democracy and introduces a provisional classification of radical democratic approaches to rights. It distinguishes between two groups of theories: those that reject rights and those that call for a reconceptualization of rights along non-liberal lines. The analysis focuses on the points of contestation with liberal rights. Section three argues for the need to revisit the standard liberal reading of the relative separation between personal, social and political realms. The author’s main normative claim is that the crisis of liberal rights is an outcome of a long process in which liberal democracies gradually abandoned their normative foundations. When considering possible paths of rehabilitation of the legal and moral authority of liberal rights, thinking beyond the given is not the worst option. The core question is how to think of, and how to practically affirm, personal autonomy in the present context.