Taken to the Cleaners: Global Capitalism Necessitates Liberal Universal Human Rights

Orientation

Is the image at the top of this article freedom? Many people think so. A single individual with no ties to anything reaching out to an infinite horizon (The Grand Canyon). After all, how many car commercials have you seen with rugged individualist men tearing around curves which might just as well have been the edge of the Grand Canyon? But what global capitalists have done is to smuggle in the infinite horizons of the global marketplace for the infinite horizons of the Grand Canyon. Capitalists must strip individuals of their intermediate connections of culture, class, ethnicity, race and historical circumstances and convince these rugged individuals that these connections are impediments to this freedom. In its place are abstract universal human rights, which are voluntary and connected to the infinite capitalist marketplace.

Linguistic propaganda: virtue and vice loaded language.
Within the linguistic side of propaganda studies there are at least 10 forms of manipulation. One of them is the use of “loaded language”. Loaded language purges our language of neutrality and invites us to use language that makes the remaining words either virtuous or villainous with nothing in between.  A good test for a loaded vice word is that you can never be for it. One such vice word is “terrorism”. A person cannot easily say they are for terrorism and want to examine its pros and cons. A virtue word is a word that also supposedly you cannot be against. For example, even if someone is an arch conservative they could not easily say, “I’m against democracy”. These days, virtually all rulers of nations claim it is a democracy although over 100 years ago democracy was not a virtue word. It was synonymous with “mob rule”. “Human rights” is another virtue word. After all, how can you be against human rights? What are you for, inhuman rights? How can you be against rights? The alternative is to be for some kind of totalitarianism. Dogmas about rights are so absolute that one could not question them without appearing to be  extremely stupid, dishonest or wicked. Opponents of rights are beyond the pale of humanity. Democratic citizens have a duty to convert the infidels.

Do human rights have a foundation?
In his book Beyond Human Rights, Alain de Benoist contends that the concept of human rights is hardly lacking in controversy. Today, human rights cannot escape its categorization as ideology, and a capitalist one at that. When one speaks of human rights de Benoist asks:

• Does it mean relative to other rights?
• What is the relationship of human rights to the importance of virtue in the ancient world?
• Do rights include duties or not?
• Are human rights independent of legal, political, economic social rights and the rights of private property?
• What do rights have to do with positive and negative freedom?
• What is the origin of human rights? Are they biological or do they start in society?
• What are the moral origins of human rights? Are they in the utilitarianism of Bentham, the morality of Kant or something else?
• Hegel has already criticized Kantian universalism as failing to take into account social morality, moral obligations to the community which result from the very  fact of belonging to it.

De Benoist claims the more the discussion of human rights extends cross-culturally and historically the more uncertainty there is regarding their nature and bases. Alasdair MacIntyre has shown that rights are never neutral or atemporal but always tied to their cultural and socio-historical context.

Where are we going?
We will track the origin and development of human rights in Western history and its landmarks in religion, epistemology, philosophy, science and law. We will also examine how human rights measure up cross-culturally as well as what human rights have to do with individualism on one hand and universalism on the other. We will discuss how universal human rights is anti-social, anti-political and surprisingly anti-democratic. We will explore the connection between universal human rights and global capitalism and their dark side results. I will close by insisting that universal human rights are rooted in liberalism and I will contrast liberalism to civic republicanism all the way back to the Greeks as an alternative to liberalist human rights. This article is based on two books, de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights and Iseult Honohan book Civic Republicanism.

Human Rights in History
According to de Benoist, if we go back to the times of the Greeks and Romans we will find that there was no such thing as human rights separate from the community. In fact the Greeks had a word for what an individual is separate from the community and that word was “iidiōtēs. Antiquity ignored the idea of fundamental human rights. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans believed that there could be human rights, which are subjective rights, attached to all individuals as subjects. For human rights to be possible the notion of the individual had to be first invented. In his book The Society of Individuals, Norbert Elias has shown that there is no equivalent in Antiquity of individuals the way we use the term.

De Benoist contends that one of the first breakthroughs to human rights in the West was in Christianity. Here we are told the individual has a soul which is connected up to a transcendental God with no necessity for culture or community. The Christian ceases to be part of a political organism. Individual rights are universal and all souls are equidistant from God erasing any qualitative differences between individuals. Individual rights are not grounded in the visible body. They are addressed to the invisible, indivisible soul. Each individual had unique value. Hegel made the coming of Christianity coincide with subjectivism. The internal world of conscience replaces the world as the locus of truth.

From the 16th century on the development of modern natural law found its chief representative in Grotius (1583-1645). There was now a judicial revolution which imposed the idea that individuals are equal before the law. Differences between humans came to be viewed as merely contingent. The first modern theoreticians of human rights argue from the idea of the state of nature which was found in the 16th century in the Spanish Jesuit Mariana. Starting with the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.  Individuals were housed within the school of modern natural law. Free individuals exist in a state of nature. They needed a common power of the state to secure their fundamental rights but this contract with the state was secondary not primary. This individual man is pre-political and pre-social. It was a choice of individuals to make a contract with the state.

De Benoist claims there was a triple revolution in Europe:

• between humans and other living beings;
• between humans and society and
• between humans and the cosmic whole.

With the secularization in Europe during the Enlightenment, individual rights were separated from the spiritual world and individual rights were first founded in political citizenship as they played out during the American and French Revolutions. Human rights are no longer imposed from the outside, from religion or natural law. They are prescribed by reason itself. We are hereby obligated to produce moral law from ourselves. At the limit, humanity is defined as the capacity to free oneself from nature, to emancipate oneself from all-natural determinations. The Declaration of the 1789 French Revolution ignores the freedom of association and more generally all forms of collective rights. Human rights are those whose realization is considered to concern the individual alone. There was a law passed by the revolutionary national assembly following the French Revolution. The law banned guilds, forbade strikes and state intervention in the economy, proclaiming free enterprise to be the sole arbitrator of French labor. Each agent defines his objectives by himself, in a voluntary manner and which adheres to society only on an instrumental basis, not an end in itself.

In 20th century evolutionary theory individual rights were grounded in the genes and natural selection was thought to exclusively operate through individual rather than group selection. Gradually the laws which originally were the foundation for the individual rights came to be viewed as negative impositions upon a naturally independent individual. The emergence of “dignity” as a category central to human rights entered the world after 1945. Dignity distinguishes humanity above the sovereignty of both individuals and peoples. Having dignity is the quality that justifies the character of abstract humanity. Dignity has a precise meaning, elevating Humanity above the rest of creation. It is always attached to an intrinsic humanity freed from all socially imposed regulation and norms. Peter Berger writes that dignity attributed to everybody has replaced “honor” which is  only present in some. This equality is placed in relation to the existence of a single God. Universal human dignity of rights was the foundation for global capitalism after World War II.

Human Rights and The Law
Under global capitalism, human rights are presented as a prerogative of all human beings supposedly independent of space and time, valid at all times and places, independent of economic or political situations, socio-historical conditions or personal qualities. Neither can these rights be given away. Rights are inalienable by definition. The problem with this claimed universalism is that according to de Benoist the very term “rights” was not older than 1537.

Originally, law was not defined as a system of rules and norms of conduct which derived from morality. For the Greeks justice in the legal sense of the term represented “good proportion, the equitable proportion between distributed possessions and duties”. Justice was a discipline aiming at best determining the means of instituting equity within a relationship. In the conception of classical natural law there is no place for universalism, subjectivism or any social contractual foundations. A subjective law, a law which would be attributable of the person outside all social life would be unthinkable. It was only from the 4th century that the law was related to justice in the sense of a universal philosophical notion.

Epistemology: the rise of nominalism
In the Middle Ages scholastic philosophy, there grew a debate about the nature of thought or the mind in relation to reality. For most of Western history thought or the mind was inseparably bound up with the world. The philosophical foundation for this was called Realism. The objective material world included thought which was outside the heads of humans. In law this is characterized as an objective, natural law founded on the nature of things. With the rise of science and within the philosophy of the Middle Ages there arose an opposition to Realism which was called nominalism. With nominalism there were no universal thoughts independent of individual experience. There was only the thought processes of individual minds. The objective world was real, but thoughts were not contained in them. There was the objective world on the one hand and the subjective world of individual experience on the other. What was considered law followed suit. We go from the notion of objective natural law founded on the nature of things to the subjective natural law founded on individual reason. With the increasing prominence of natural science, right was no longer thought of as being derived from divine law but from human nature alone, characterized by reason.

The affirmation that the individual has their rights is the extraordinary rise in the power of the legal sphere.Tocqueville wrote that in the US there is hardly a political question which does not end by turning itself sooner or later into a legal question. The law can float above politics. It can only be exercised beyond a political community.

Cross-Cultural sensitivity in the West about law
Friedrich Carl von Savigny was a German jurist who challenged the French jurists of his time by claiming that law is something that can only be derived from a specific culture and history of a nation and not something that can be universally applied to all nations. Sir Henry Maine was an English jurist and historian who was initially a student of ancient Roman law. He  compared the Roman concept of the individual as someone bound to his identity in specific groups to the modern concept of the autonomous individual. After spending many years in India he concluded there was no single system of law that can be universally applied.

How Timeless Are Human Rights Cross-Culturally?
De Benoist points out that the alleged universality of human rights is bound to run up against the diversity of cultures and values. In all the declarations of human rights at the UN, the universality of human rights is constantly being reworked.  But why multiply the declarations if they are all universally alike? In fact, they are not alike. Some stress rights, others stress duties. Some contain political rights while others include social and economic rights. For example, Universal Islamic rights include:

• God who is the source of all law – Creator, Sustainer, Sovereign;
• Wisdom of the Divine Guidance brought by prophets and
• The Khaimah as a mediator to fulfill the will of God on earth.

What does this have to do with the universality of human rights of the West which avoids all reference to God and assumes that man is of one kind? What does this have to do with a secularized individualist society following a capitalist economy of mass consumption? The Western notion of individual rights is far from common to everyone. The very idea of universal human rights belongs to the specific contexts built up  of Western modernity, as we have seen. The theory of universal human rights, with respect to all human cultures represents the exception rather than the rule. It even constitutes the exception within European culture when we consider Eastern Europe. Only a very small portion of humanity has and it has taken a long time to even be perceived.  It does not have a universal foundation geographically, philosophically or morally.  In Beyond Human Rights, De Benoist writes:

Up until the Middle Ages one does not find in any European languages a term designating a right as a subjective attribute. There did not exist any word to designate these rights considered as belonging to men by virtue of their humanity alone. This fact alone, judges Alasdair MacIntyre, leads one to doubt their reality. He is never conceived of as a monad. In these cultures, the notion of subjective rights is absent, whereas those of mutual obligation and reciprocity are omnipresent. Asiatic thought is expressed above all in the language of duties. The world of duties is logically anterior to the world of rights.

In the Middle East the notions of respect and honor determined the obligations within the extended family and the clan. Yet that does not signify either the desire for despotism, coercion or ill-treatment.

Alasdair MacIntyre addresses sum up his opposition to the ideology of human rights by saying:

• universal human rights are not found everywhere, and
• modern discourse tries to frame these rights as timeless (“atemporal”) features of human nature, when in reality, they are merely a product of the late Middle Ages and the Enlightenment.

Spanish priest Raimundo Panikkar has shown very well that we can find in all cultures, without difficulty, an anthropomorphic equivalence of human rights:

• In India, dharma, and
• Chinese rites.

But these cultures do not declare dharma and rites as universal. It is only the West that arrogance to proclaim this.

Contradictions within Human Rights
Uniqueness and equality are incompatible
De Benoist next attacks the interchangeability that liberal human rights theorists make between equality and uniqueness. De Benoist claims that if all individual humans are equal, if they are all fundamentally the same, if they are the same as everybody else, then far from a unique personality, people are interchangeable. This abstract equivalence of people necessarily contradicts the proclamation of the absolute individuality of the subject. No human can be:

• unique or
• identical to every other

Inversely, one cannot:

• possess a unique value of the individual
• while treating his personal characteristics as indifferent, rather than qualitative or quantitatively different.

You can‘t have your cake and eat it too. If individuals are unique there are qualitative differences between ourselves and others. If individuals are equal, they are interchangeable.

Universal human rights are antithetical to politics
De Benoist reminds us that in the beginning the theory of human rights in the 18t century was political. It was claimed as a protection against a particular political form – despotism. Gradually the rights of people to political sovereignty as citizens weakened after World War II in the United States with the elite democracy of pluralism. But after that as capitalism got hold of rights it depoliticized it and turned political rights into human rights which were not connected to any type of society

The universalization of human rights was connected to capitalist consumption and moved center stage. For example, my universal human right to be a world consumer of Amazon books is confirmed whenever I buy a book. My universal human right is now independent of all participation in political affairs. I have universal human rights whether I vote for a conservative, a liberal, a socialist or if I don’t vote at all. For Marx these so-called rights of men never went beyond egoistic global consumption.

Universal human rights is antithetical to political democracy
De Benoist contends that democracy and universal human rights stem from different sources.
Democracy is a political doctrine rooted in citizenship of a particular country while universal human rights is a legal and moral doctrine and these two types do not mix well. The ideology of universal human rights can only recognize abstract individuals, while democracy knows only specific citizens with political rights of citizens before the law, freedom of petition, equal rights of suffrage and equal access to jobs. For political democracy legitimacy is found in the sovereignty assent of the people. The political rights of the individual are to make political sovereign decisions, whether in or out of elections. These political rights can come into conflict with universal human rights under capitalism which may or may not be democratic in terms of sovereignty. Every real democratic polity must recognize that the society which it governs exceeds the simple sum of its constituent individuals. In universal human rights society is not more than the sum of individuals with these rights. Individuals are not a universal humanity first. Individuals are first members of concrete societies with cultures, classes and are embedded in historical situations. Citizenship in a particular society comes first. Whatever rights follow are products of the local situation. Universal human rights abstract themselves from politics and aligns itself with what is legal and moral.

Human Rights Universalism and Subjectivity are Built from the Repressions of Community
De Benoist claims universalism is a corruption of objectivity. Whereas objectivity is achieved from the comparison of particular things, universalism claims to define particularity from an abstract notion which precedes it. Universalism is an overwhelming abstraction from which the knowledge of the nature of things is supposed to follow. Furthermore, It represents the symmetrical opposite of subjectivity. The ideology of human rights combines these two errors:

• It is universalist as much as it wishes to impose itself upon everyone without considerations of relationship traditions and contexts.
• It is subjectivist as much as it defines rights as the subjective attributes of a single individual unconnected with any community.

Human rights are the sole compass of a disintegrating epoch, as Regis Debray writes “the soul of a soulless world”.  Real political freedom must be removed from the rut of universalism and subjectivity. The question of freedom cannot be resolved in terms of law or morality. It is a political question and should be resolved politically.

Human Rights and Capitalism
Associated with the universalist expansion of markets, the discussion of human rights constitutes the ideological armor of globalization. The Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 in which the nations of Europe recognized each other’s territorial integrity. Universal human rights undermines the integrity of nation-states by accepting interference in nation-state polities. It suggests that every state can interfere at will in the internal affairs of another state under the pretext of preventing attacks on human rights. De Benoist claims that in international politics there is as no precedence for this in international law. Carl Schmitt hits the nail on the head when he said the concept of universal humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument for imperialist expansion. The good of humanity is not a political concept.  It is a legal and moral concept in the service of capitalist imperialism.

De Benoist contends that human rights is a Trojan horse introduced secretly into the heart of the political, religious and collectivist identities of non-Western civilizations with the aim of forcing them to accept the global capitalism and social contract theories of rights it is based on. But what compatibility is there between universal human rights and the existence  of Chinese, Arab, and Indian civilizations that predated the West by at least a millennium? Accompanied by the planetary extension of the market universal human rights provides it with the ideological, humanitarian dress that it needs

The Darkside of Human Rights
In the name of universal human rights, we find the decimation or Belgrade, Baghdad and Tripoli , while the former soviet state are attacked by color revolutions.  Squads of capitalists dispatched by corporations will follow the ideological bulldozers driven by evangelists Christians convinced that rights grounded in community is blasphemous. De Benoist points out that In the Palace of Nations in Geneva, away from the cries of the people, experts are currently superimposing universally applicable human rights, bypassing the constitutions of sovereign states. These universal human rights which go against the most ancient laws of people’s traditions. The Trilateral Commission established in 1973 had two theoreticians – Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski who wanted to restrain democracy while expanding capitalism. A bridge had to be found – the ideology of human rights. As many of you know, Samuel P. Huntington was a US political scientist who became infamous for serving as an adviser to authoritarian regimes such as South Africa in the 1980s. He told them nations transitioning to modernity must be cautious about not introducing democracy too quickly into their societies.

What is an alternative? Classical Republicanism or Civic Humanism and Communitarianism                                                   At the end of his book Beyond Human Rights, de Benoist offers the republican tradition of politics as an alternative to universal human rights and the communitarian tradition in the United States. Since De Benoist does not go into detail about the forms of Republicanism, I will use the book Civil Republicanism by Iseult Honohan to flesh this out.

Distinguishing Republicans from Liberals
Universal human rights is grounded in the political philosophy of liberalism  
There is a reason I am calling universal human rights “liberal” universal human rights in this article. This is because liberalism is a larger category within which universal human rights is a subcategory. In order to understand de Benoist’s alternative to universal human rights we need to understand the difference between a liberal political view of the world and a republican view of the world. Universal human rights is grounded in a specific liberal tradition which includes the type of economy, the relationship between the state and society, the size of the state, how freedom is conceived, what is political sovereignty, the relationship between the public and private life and what is considered the good life? The place of intermediate social organizations; the type of political loyalty expected; the relationship between politics and economics; the expectations of the self and the anthropology of human nature. Please take a glance at the center and right columns of Table I below.

What is republicanism?
If I were to ask you what the opposite is of a liberal, you will probably say “conservative”. However, liberals and neoconservatives in the United States actually have more in common with each other than the much older tradition of republicanism. As a point of clarification, the use of our term “republican” has as much to do with the Republican Party in the United States as the Democratic Party has to do with democracy: that is, nothing.

Republican theory goes back to Aristotle in Greece, Cicero in Rome and was prevalent in the Italian city-states within the work of Machiavelli. The heart of republican theory is that we are primarily socio-political beings. This means that what makes us human and distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we are interdependent as a species and we collectively plan our future together. The process of debating what we shall do in the future is politics. For republicans, if we were stripped of their socio-political activity we would no longer be fully human. Aristotle argued that unlike animals, we are not totally determined by internal drives and external constraints. Yet we are not gods who are arbitrary and self-determined. Our intermediary status makes us fated to compromise with others – and politics is the practice of compromise.

The process of bringing people together made the results of this work “public goods”. Politics is a joy and an end in itself. Citizenship constitutes this membership in the great gathering. This is not to say politics is easy or harmonious. Different groups bring different needs and expectations to the table and they struggle for power. Yet politics was not a zero-sum game. Through political discussion over public plans and goods more plans, ideas and projects emerge than were there at the beginning. Politics is not something to be gotten over with, a means to other ends. Citizenship was an end in itself. Politics and public life are synonymous. Freedom for republicans was freedom to do things, to decide the fate of society. Republicanism citizenship means active participation, without any mediations or representations. Participation is more than just deciding on social policy. Citizens must also have training in defending their country through citizen militia, civic education and civic religious ceremonies.

Republicans are not like democrats. In place of a single sovereign there is mixed government –  a combination of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in which the social forces of institutions of government are pitted against one another to prevent domination of the state by particular interests. Neither did republicans believe all classes in society should participate equally. Active citizens need to have property, but excessive wealth undermines political equality. Neither did they think, as Marxists do, that we are primarily socio-economic beings. Economic distribution was the result of political debate, not its cause. The reason some classes had more than others is because human beings were not born equal and these natural inequalities came to the political table. Yet at the forum, all social classes had a voice and political activity was the process of transforming conflict into cooperation. The state in republican theory was an organic part of society a spontaneous coordinating activity. The purpose of the state was to bring people together and to oversee the community.

Theorists of Republicanism include J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner and more recently Philip Petit in his book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. It has principally been related to the Roman Republican tradition. It reappeared in the Renaissance connected to the Machiavelli and to the Florentine and Venetian humanists. Civic republicanism has been progressively dethroned in Anglo Saxon countries since the Enlightenment by liberalism.  De Benoist also cites the communitarian works of Alasdair Macintyre in his book After Virtue, Charles Taylor, in his book Sources of the Self, Michael Sandel in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice and many of the works of Christopher Lasch as sources for alternatives to liberalism and universal human rights.

The variety of republican traditions
Centuries and civilizations separate Aristotle from Machiavelli, Cicero from Madison and they address different immediate questions yet of all political theories they are the most self-consciously historical. Machiavelli, Harrington, Madison and Rousseau all see themselves as coming from Greece or Rome. While all recognize Machiavelli as central, some trace the tradition differently.

In his book The Machiavellian Moment, J.G.A. Pocock has outlined a continuing thread from Athens and Aristotle through Machiavelli and Harrington to the American revolution. He emphasizes political participation, civic virtue and corruption along with the historical specificity and fragility of republican politics. Pocock challenges the idea that the American Revolution was guided solely by Lockean natural right principles as does Michael Sandel in his book Democracy’s Discontent.  Pocock outlined a historical interpretation of US politics as originally republican in contrast to the liberal politics of individual interest and rights which gradually superseded it.

On the other hand, the more right-wing republicans like Quentin Skinner in his book Liberty before Liberalism traces their lineage from Cicero. Then it crystallized in the Renaissance as Neo-Roman republicanism and was given its classic formulation by Machiavelli. It was further specified in the English 17th century and included Harrington and Sidney. This republicanism was less politically active, stressing citizenship not as an end in itself but as rule under law, as means of preserving individual freedom rather than an activity or relationship which had significant intrinsic value.  Today Republicanism is a specific variant of communitarians which values citizenship from other kinds of community which are based on pre-political commonality such as race, religion, culture.

Liberals
In contrast to Republicanism, the liberal tradition emerged in Europe with the social contract theorists, Hobbes, Locke and to a lesser extent Rousseau, which straddles both republican and liberal traditions. For social contract theorists humans are born with pre-political natural rights which are either biological or given to us by God (Locke). By nature we prefer solitude. However, we cannot survive in that condition and so we carefully pull down the drawbridge from our individualist castle and prudently test the waters of social engagement based on the calculation of individual self-interest which includes material happiness and bodily security.

The basis for the formation of a society for liberals is in the form or a contract in which humans reluctantly agree because the dangers of living independently are too high. Unlike republicans, we are already human before the social contract and any political activity is a means to other, more important private ends. For liberals the purpose of political activity is to advance interests. From this self-interest of society or enlightened self-interest emerges. The state for liberals is not a natural outgrowth of society but an artificial superimposition over society, the job of which was to protect the rights and liberties of individuals. Since people were primarily greedy, suspicious and aggressive (Hobbes’s version) the state was necessary to keep people safely apart from each other. The state had no responsibility to the community. The community was best served by the play of market (capitalist) forces.

For liberals, politics is a burden, a zero-sum game of competing interests where one group’s addition is another group’s subtraction. Politics for liberals is a bargaining flea market of horse trading. Liberal politics as nothing more than the chambermaid for private interests. Politics is not the art of becoming and sustaining our humanity. Political scientist Benjamin Barber points out the subtitle of Lasswell’s text on Politics is “Who Gets What, When and How?”summarizes liberal notions of politics.

For liberals, politics is an instrumental goal and means to gaining something beyond itself. For liberals, life is primarily private and public life was an unfortunate, necessary means to get back to the real business of life which was private and economic. For liberals, conflict is not something that can lead to higher levels of cooperation. Rather, conflict was tolerated. Individuals were understood as static and the idea was to cultivate a sense in which everyone was entitled to remain exactly the same. Freedom for liberals is negative freedom. Freedom from state tyranny, religious tyranny, freedom of belief and association.

Like republicans, liberals are not democrats. For liberals we are born inferior or superior as measured by natural endowment. We acquire equality only formally before the law in socially sanctioned political arrangements, a civic mantle of artificial equality. Citizenship for liberals involves representation. Contemporary society is understood as too complex for citizens to actively determine social policy and so they must trust their representatives to do so. Citizenship involves consent given to representative, not direct participation.

For liberals, power is understood not as power to or power with. Power is understood as power over. If power over is translated politically as the power of the state over the individual then freedom for the liberal is to get away from this power. Political theorist  Benjamin Barber points out that for liberals freedom and power are defined as antonyms by the absence of the other. All the great historical liberals, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Godwin, Bentham, Mill and Hobhouse as well as 20th century liberals, Isaiah Berlin, Lasswell and Dahl agree. It is largely through this polarization between freedom and power that liberalism acquires its characteristic suspicion of politics. The state as the principal locus of physical coercion becomes freedom most implacable entity. Politics becomes the art of power and freedom becomes the art of anti-politics

What liberals and republicans agree on
Republican and liberal traditions agree on a number of things. They both emerge in commercial societies. Republican theory developed in mercantile capitalism of the Greeks and Romans or the Italian city-states of Early modern period. Liberal tradition emerged during agricultural capitalism (slavery) of the 17th century. Secondly, each is loosely opposed to absolutists of any kind, whether the monarchy or the Church. Thirdly, each accepts class differences as the starting point of their theories. Table 1 below summarizes the differences between republicans and liberals.

               Table 1 Republican vs Liberal Political Traditions

Summing Up
Alain de Benoist denounces liberal universal human rights as a model for the New European Right because universal human rights are:

• propagandistic loaded virtue words;
• cross-culturally and historically insensitive;
• abstracts itself from politics and political democracy;
• an ideological cover for global capitalism and counter-revolutionary color revolutions;
• Justifies unlimited migration which provides capitalists with cheap labor
• mistakenly imagines that uniqueness and equality are compatible;
• its foundations are legal and moral rather than political and
• associated with liberalism as opposed to Republicanism.

Universal human rights’ origins are:

• in Christianity;
• modern natural law of Grotius;
• state of nature in social contract theory;
• epistemologically the rise of nominalism over realism;
• enlightenment – rights separated from natural law;
• French revolution strips society of its intermediate bodies;
• individuals’ rights are associated exclusively with reason and
• use of the term “dignity” to define itself after World War II replaces “honor”.

This article was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2026 at 8:01am and is filed under Capitalism, Communitarianism, Corporate Globalization, History, Human Rights, Language, Legal/Constitutional, Liberalism, Mind Control, Neoliberalism, Participatory Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, The "West".