If Dorothy Had Not Had Toto to Pull Back the Wizard’s Curtain: The Fabrication of Human Rights as a World Religion

Abstract:     
This paper examines the increasing penetration and control of nations by amorphous ideas of human rights, touching upon the symbiotic relation between global capital and human rights, the anti-democratic nature of many rights, the radically political nature of positive rights, the frequent absence of national self-esteem and the consequent yearning for supranational approval, the belief that judges and their surrogates are priests speaking for God, the search for validating judicial will as replacement for a dead God, loss of judicial confidence in reason, and banal judicial vanity. These lead to the creation of the last and greatest Leviathan, a mortal god that can never be dethroned.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 16

Keywords: Human rights, international human rights, United Nations, civil religion, rights antinomies, global governance, cultural imperialism, cultural hegemony, rights as religion, world religion

JEL Classification: B30, B31, D63, D64, H41, J17, J18, K1, K14, K19, K39

Accepted Paper Series