The Inhumanity of Right [Paperback]

The first English translation of Christos Yannaras' pioneering critique of the modern legal concept of the right of the individual.

Christos Yannaras' pioneering critique of the concept of the right of the individual is presented in English for the first time. This central aspect of political theory (since Hegel's Philosophy of Right) summarizes the philosophical and cultural identity of the paradigm of modernity, but the philosophical assumptions underlying the concept of right have not hitherto been subject to scrutiny. Yannaras shows that the starting-point of the concept of right is a phenomenalistic naturalism, which presupposes an abstract concept of the human subject as a fundamentally undifferentiated natural individual. The question is also explored of how the priority accorded to this concept of right is related to the contemporary crisis of the modern politico-social paradigm, while a new preface from the translator underlines the continued significance of Yannaras' proposal for Anglophone readers.

Against the modern concept of right with its illusion of objectivity, The Inhumanity of Right sketches out the basic lines of a political theory that prioritizes new social needs that reflect the relational character of the human person.GBDuring the long crisis of late modernity, future-oriented theorists are struggling to identify and to overcome the limits and design flaws of our era's paradigm. Human rights form one of the pillars of this paradigm, and their inadequacy, even inability to deliver is by now clear to anyone with a modicum of discernment. Need one mention Guantanamo Bay, the weaponization of human rights in the context of the 'responsibility to protect' doctrine, the evidence published by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, or the price they paid? In this prophetic book from the late 1990s, published here for the first time in English, Christos Yannaras speaks not merely of the inadequacy of individual rights, but even of thelƒ’