Critical theory and human rights by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-06-01T14:59:30+00:00

Governmentality beyond liberal rights

What this means, in effect, is that wherever there are laws which declare purposes or specify the means of achieving them, or are conceptualised or read as doing so, there will be a requirement to “govern” accordingly – to act indirectly so as to bring about the desired end. This is why, indeed, it is increasingly common to describe forms of governmentality appearing in decidedly non-liberal contexts, such as in modern China,⁵⁰ Bangladesh,⁵¹ or South-East Asia.⁵² This puts the way human rights are typically thought of in relation to liberalism in a different light.

Roughly, the schema which is often sketched out in this regard is as follows. As the early modern period progressed, rule became increasingly concerned with what Foucault called “biopolitics” – “the attempt … to rationalise problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race.”⁵³ (Much of this will of course be evident from our previous discussion.) In other words, for reasons which we will come to, the matter of government became increasingly focused on topics such as life and death, physical and mental health, procreation, and so on, and its aim to optimise those factors in the population as a whole. But this coincided, more or less, with two other factors – the discovery of the economy and the theory and practices of sovereignty – which provided methods for restraining or critiquing bio-politics. For the first of these, of course, this is because the recognition of the existence of an economy led inexorably towards the understanding that economic growth must in large part derive from free commerce. This imperative meant that the biopolitical impulse, if it can be called that, was naturally restrained by the need for “frugal” government at least within the economy.⁵⁴ For the second, sovereignty as it was understood in the eighteenth century was contingent upon a framework of right, both of the ruler and subjects, and the emergent rights of subjects were a clear buttress against any attempt to directly achieve biopolitical goals.

This makes liberalism, in the words of Dean, an “ethos of review” – an ever-present “[suspicion] that one is governing too much.”⁵⁵ It is not so much that liberalism is contingent on the doctrine of a minimal State, but rather that the biopolitical impulse, which drives towards the coordinated and centralised administration of life, “will need to be weighed against the norms of economic processes and the norms derived from the democratization of the sovereign subject of right.”⁵⁶

So far so good, and it will of course be evident that this provides us with an understanding of the role played within liberalism by law as perhaps the most important element of that “ethos of review.” Law will be deployed for purposes which can be described as biopolitical in precisely the fashion which I outlined earlier in the chapter when discussing the example of minimum pricing for alcohol – a policy which, it will have been observed, is practically the quintessence of that concept.

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