Legal language can function as democratic liberation for excluded groups

Evidence

Rüstow’s fellow panellists at the 1957 ‘Liberalism and Colonialism’ session reacted violently to his critique of European colonialism. Yet they too sought to develop a language to pathologise postcolonial sovereignty and transform the postcolonial state into a barrier against the popular aspirations of its people – not a vehicle for their realisation. For the neoliberals, sovereignty had never been the telos of the civilising mission. Quite the opposite, their challenge was always to restrain popular sovereignty, to prevent ‘the masses’ from capturing the state and refusing the discipline imposed by the competitive market order. Freed from its relation to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 295 (#complicates, via linked claim)

It is a discourse that is inevitably disqualified, that can and must be kept in the margins, precisely because its negation is the precondition for a true and just discourse that can at last begin to function—in the middle, between the adversaries, above their heads—as a law. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1848 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The abstract universality of rights discourse enables its expansion to excluded groups — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 228; Formal legal procedure protects minorities better than informal deliberation does — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 549; Scientific language’s exclusionary conventions undermine democratic environmental dialogue — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1266 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Human-rights language served to restrain postcolonial popular sovereignty #complicates (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 295
• Philosophico-juridical discourse must exclude and negate war discourse to appear neutral and lawful #complicates (0.76) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1848
• Conflating rule of law with social justice erases moral discourse beyond legality #complicates (0.75)
• Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives #complicates (0.74) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609
• Moralized character language masked race-coded political exclusion in Indies administration #complicates (0.71) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 802