Rights, World-Society and the Crisis of Legal Universalism

The universalism of rights is a corollary to the individualistic semantics of the Enlightment and the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the grounds of universalism were those legal and political concepts that theoretically describe the 19th century nation-state (such as sovereignty of the people, citizenship, rights, and the like). All these concepts of the liberal tradition construct the nation-state on the presupposition of a highly homogeneous political community of rational subjects, whose homogeneity consists in the very social, economic, political and sexual conditions of their rationality. This kind of legal and political semantics is no longer adequate to characterize contemporary society which is a multicultural, highly inhomogeneus world-society. It no longer incorporates an ethic which is able to enforce universal leading values for human action. The example discussed is that of constitutional patriotism of Jurgen Habermas