Author Archives: Ben Golder

About Ben Golder

Ben Golder is associate professor of law in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He works at the intersection of legal and political theory, serving on the editorial committee of Law & Critique and as a general editor of Contemporary Political Theory. His last book was Foucault and the Politics of Rights (Stanford, 2015) and he is currently at work on a manuscript about post-foundational approaches to human rights. Recent writings have investigated legal performativity, human rights and metaphor, and the intellectual legacy of the legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick.

Critiquing Human Rights

Abstract: This essay reviews three recent books which each provide a different account of human rights and their critics. Jean-Yves Pranchère and Justine Lacroix’s Human Rights on Trial constructs a genealogy of critiques of human rights discourse from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Joe Hoover’s Reconstructing Human Rights proposes a critically redemptive approach to human rights, pushing human rights further leftward through the resources of pragmatism and agonistic theories of democracy. But it is ultimately Ratna Kapur’s Freedom in a Fishbowl that Continue reading → Continue reading →