Human rights discourse collapses social justice into state-enforced law.

Evidence

The Declaration states that unless human rights are “protected by the rule of law,” subjects will be “compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.” It is not immediately clear whether this is to be read as a warning to rulers to be prudent or a recognition that the ruled are morally entitled to retrieve their natural rights. And yet The Declaration seems to justify rebellion only when it can be seen as a response to the government’s violation of human rights law, although all infringements of the law (and their remedy) can be properly determined only by a court of law. There is no explicit recognition that what is allowed by the law may be unjust and therefore intolerable; there is only the statement that nothing contravening human rights can be lawful (which is either a tautology or untrue). In other words, The Declaration seems to assume a direct convergence of “the rule of law” (a notion that depends on the proper maintenance of rights by state institutions) with social justice (a vision of social life that logically presupposes remedies but not necessarily rights, and that is concerned more with questions of distribution and civility than with individual rights and liberties). If that is the case, the rule called law in effect usurps the entire universe of moral discourse. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 670

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the Cooper/neoliberalism thread: Asad shows how ‘secular’ legal-rational rights discourse forecloses substantive distributive justice, echoing how the liberal legal order privileges procedural over material claims.