A realistic utopia? Critical analyses of The Human Rights State in theory and deployment: Guest editors’ introduction

We introduce this special issue on Benjamin Gregg’s recent theory of a human rights state by contextualising it within current human rights scholarship and explicating its core claims, before we provide an overview of the eight contributions. We argue that the concept of a human rights state addresses two interrelated problems within human rights research by bridging the significant disconnect in the literature between human rights theory and practice. First, it conceives human rights as socially constructed norms whose reach and validity are historically contingent, depending on their free embrace and effective implementation by their local addressees. In this way it dispenses with the ever fruitless, even counterproductive attempts to advance human rights by claims about their putative, ultimate normative foundation. Second, it overcomes the limitations and failures of the top-down, generally unenforceable international human rights regime with a bottom-up alternative: the human rights state as a metaphorical polity in which activists promote human rights-friendly change within the corresponding nation state. In each case of such a metaphorical polity, a network of self-selected activists within the nation state promotes the free embrace of self-authored human rights through incorporating those rights in the nation state’s legal and political system. Subsequently, aspirations to an international human rights law would finally be redeemed as effective norms through the overlapping agreement among more and more political communities that have freely embraced their self-authored human rights and institutionalised them at local levels

Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny Michael Tomasello. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019 pp. 392.

No philosophical question is older than What are we, we humans? Michael Tomasello contributes a splendid, empirically based answer to this hoary debate in Becoming Human, with a programmatic subtitle, A Theory of Ontogeny. We humans are an evolved organism with a capacity to create culture only by means of which we can realize aspects of our biological selves—and just as our biology can realize aspects of our cultural selves. That is, our biology evolved in ways that released in us capacities for “culture” that, in turn, released in us biologically relevant capacities, with “enormous and cascading phenotypic effects”—but effects “not encoded directly in the genes” (5)