Human Rights and Politics

 

“Human Rights and Politics”

Reading Lefort’s article as a foil to Marx’s 1844 article is salutary—and I thank Jean Cohen for proposing this pairing—because Lefort’s article presents one of the most compelling historical challenges to Marx’s position. It presents what we call, in jurisprudence, the “hard case,” perhaps the hardest case: a situation where human rights discourse is very legitimately being deployed against communism