Doug:
> > But many people who resist war and repression do so by citing the
> > Rights of Man thing. Is the problem with the discourse, or its
> > hypocritical and inconsistent application?
jean-christophe helary:
> it has taken close to 200 years to include the 1789 declaration
> into an industrially developed country's constitution (france).
> ie the time when the discourse and its application will be
> actually consistant is coming slowly. i mean the declaration is
> not a formal piece of paper with nice things written on it
> anymore, but is officially recognized as something about as
> important as the constitutional text itself. actually the last
> decade has seen a lot of legal interpretation that put the
> declaration above any other legal text in french law.
>
> i suppose the 'application' problem comes from the fact that
> it is pretty challenging to put to practice something that is
> supposed to be 'universal'. i don't know.
I think the discourse is intrinsically hypocritical and inconsistent. However, hypocrisy and inconsistency aren't always bad things (as noted above).
The problem is that the Rights of Man thing is rhetoric. Just as rhetoric cannot embody more than a small part of the truth, a fact that cautions science and gives the lie to much philosophy, so it cannot embody more than a small part of freedom. Hence the Tenth-Amendment escape hatch in the Bill of Rights; the Founding Fathers were evidently aware of the problem, yet being deeply committed to rhetoric, they attempted to rhetoricize the unrhetoricizable and provided for unnamed and perhaps undefinable rights to cover whatever was missing. (One is reminded of the ancient Athenians' temple to the unknown god, appropriated by St. Paul in Acts 17:22-29, set up supposedly because the citizens were wisely afraid they might have overlooked one.)
Yet various statements of freedom-claiming rights certainly have had their uses, as marks in the political terrain, which, however arbitrarily, mark the advances and retreats of the slavemasters and their opponents in an otherwise ambiguous and amorphous fog of war. Maybe I'll be Straussian (is that correct?) and say that the Rights of Man thing is good enough for the masses, for now; but serious leftists should recognize its defects, both theoretical and practical (noted above). Otherwise they run the risk of being taken for a ride by the St. Pauls of liberalism, ever vigilant to appropriate any manifestation of freedom and get it under control.
-- Gordon