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Podcast: New Books in Human Rights
Episode: Christoph Menke, "Critique of Rights" (Polity, 2019)
Description: Christoph Menke, who is professor of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany and considered the most important representative of the third generation of the "Frankfurt School of Critical Theory", presents in Critique of Rights (Polity Press 2020) a critical reflection on modern normativity in the so-called "Western world". More specifically: He analyzes âsubjective rightsâ. To have a right means to have a justified and binding claim. Now Menke exposes in his book â which is both a genealogy and an ontology of law â that these âsubjective rightsâ, which mark the birth of bourgeois society, have ambivalent properties. They are not only expre...