Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights

Notes

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Moyn dates the increase in journalistic usage from the 1960s, with a surge in 1977 (231). 2. A historical orientation to the Cold War evolution of rights may be found in Baxi; Glendon; Hunt; Koshy; and Moyn. 3. For a larger discussion of representing Afghan women’s rights, one might begin with Brodsky as well as Farrell and McDermott. 4. For an initial orientation to the problematic representation of human rights, see Baxi; Bradley and Petro; Cheah; Cubilié; Goldberg; Hesford and Kozol; Keenan; Kiss; Lyon and Olson; Merry; Moeller; Mutua; and Schaffer and Smith. 5. In her treatment of rights traditions, Singer identifies four traditional foundations of rights: individualism, a priorism, essentialism, and adversarialism (claims against another). Singer defines rights as entailing a relationship between an entitlement to a right and an obligation to respect it. By this definition, she rejects earlier traditions. 6. The critique of rights universalism is tellingly massive. One might see An-Na’im; Baxi; Butler (Precarious Life); Donnelly; Hua; Kennedy; Koshy; Mahbubani; Mutua; Narayan ; Spivak; and Whitlock. Some scholars attempt to modify universalism in mitigating ways. Consider Mailloux’s concept of “contingent universals” (Disciplinary Identities) or Badiou’s discussion of universalism. 7. Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity, particularly the introduction, provides a useful discussion of the conceptual history of norms. 8. Mutua argues that the West has framed the discourse of rights in the metaphors of savior, savage, and victim. 9. The Harvard sociologist Steven Pinker has documented a decreasingly violent world and Peter Singer has documented a decrease in world poverty. Pinker posits six trends contributing to the decline in violence: the Pacification Process of transition to agricultural civilization; the Civilizing Process of forming larger kingdoms with centralized authority and commercial infrastructures; the Humanitarian Revolution of the Enlightenment; the Long Peace following World War II, a peace among great powers; a following New Peace of declining war in general; and the Rights Revolution following on the heels of the UDHR. Although all these trends are transformative, both the Enlightenment ’s Humanitarian Revolution and the Human Rights Revolution require specific changes in how whole societies of humans view each other and come to treat each other as competently human, if not as equals. Beyond political change, they mark changes in relationships and attachments. 10. Despite many humanistic analyses of how human rights are represented and interpreted, extended inquiries into human rights deliberation are limited, though growing . Although none of these examples is directly concerned with deliberative theory, their concern with public discourse and rights rhetoric has varying implications for 184 NOTES TO pAGES 8–13 deliberative rhetoric. A brief survey of rhetorically oriented work includes publications by Doxtader; Hasian; Hauser; Hesford; Hua; Merry; Lyon and Olson; Patton; Payne; and Royster and Cochran. 11. J. Cohen, Habermas, and Rawls are recognized as laying the core arguments, but deliberative democracy informs much of democratic theory today. For introductions, see Benhabib (“Toward”) and Bohman. Also see Barber; Fishkin; and Gutmann and Thompson (Democracy).There is a broad range of theorists characterizing themselves as deliberative democrats; some are more inflected by rhetoric or postmodernism. For example, Payne frames her work in deliberative democracy, but she is articulate on the benefits of “contentious coexistence” as a frame for democracy-building practices. 12. Responding to the political limits of epistemic and hermeneutical rhetorics, which dominated the twentieth century, rhetoricians are looking for more contentious forms of rhetorical theory, ones that might rehabilitate contestation. Lynch, George, and Cooper make a compelling argument for a historic response to the academic rhetorics that dominated the twentieth century. 13. Even if Hauser, Eberly, and Wells are more concerned with the public sphere than deliberative democracy, their books represent the depth of Habermas’s penetration into rhetoric. 14. For example, Nino examined rights in connection to constitutions and deliberative democracy, but inherent in his connection is a definition of human rights as civil rights guaranteed by constitutional definitions of legitimate state power. Against the failed states, exemplified by Rwanda, Afghanistan, Haiti, or Yugoslavia, deliberative democracy and constitutionalism promote an important stable political and economic order. See also Dworkin; Fox; Franck; Holmes; and Koh and Slye’s anthology Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights. 15. This book attempts to avoid repeating the arguments between philosophers and rhetoricians, as they are well known and often proceed in caricatures. For some balanced discussions, see Hariman; Kimball; Vickers; and the essays in Connors, Ede, and Lunsford ’s Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. 16. See Habermas (“Three...