The End of Human Rights? History, Critique, and Defense of a Prescriptive Concept

This article reconstructs the genealogy of one of the most enduring objections to the discourse of rights: the accusation of abstraction. Rather than treating abstraction as a single criticism, it argues that its meaning has undergone profound conceptual transformations from the late eighteenth century to the present. Beginning with Burke's critique of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, it traces how abstraction came to signify rationalistic construction, exclusion from the universal subject, denial of human nature, juridical indeterminacy, the hubris of reason, practical incompleteness, and ideological domination. It then examines how these critiques were reformulated after 1948 in response to the emergence of contemporary human rights. The article argues that human rights cannot be understood apart from this history of criticism. Rather than undermining their legitimacy, successive accusations of abstraction have repeatedly driven the philosophical, universal, and institutional development of the human rights project.