Almost a year ago, and in collaboration with openDemocracy, we embarked on a project to examine, evaluate and critique liberalism in neoliberal times. As we suggested in our introduction to the series, our aim was ‘to provoke critical engagement with the theories, histories, practices and contradictions of liberalism today, in particular by taking specific contemporary topics as a way of assessing the transformations in, as well as the transformative aspects of, liberalism.’ We are grateful to our contributors and to openDemocracy for their time, intellectual generosity and for lively, engaging and timely interventions that pursued specific contemporary debates to examine liberalism as a combination of liberating and limiting ideas.
One strand of the series focused on human rights. Putting ‘liberalism’ and ‘human rights’ together tends to prompt critique from political theorists. Liberalism is invoked to justify injustices that are simultaneously made invisible: the oppression of women, colonial adventures, socio-economic inequalities, disciplining disruptive subjectivities. If human rights are too closely tied to liberalism, justice becomes impossible. As Ratna Kapur, quoting Gayatri Spivak puts it, while human rights are ‘something we cannot not want’, their progressive potential is limited through too close an association with liberalism. The critical articles in this series are excellent, and make a brilliant case for why we should remain suspicious. On the other hand, both Basak Cali, writing on the European Court of Human Rights, and Roberto Gargarella, writing on the Argentinian constitution, make a case for the continuing value of political liberalism in relation to human rights. And Monika Krause refuses the link between liberalism and human rights altogether: in a pragmatic sense, perhaps what guides thought and practice on human rights is more concrete examples than ideology?
