Soviet dissidents’ influence discredited revolutionary Marxism and cleared the way for human-rights ideology.

Evidence

The influence of Marxism on the French left, as the anti-totalitarian political philosopher Claude Lefort had noted five years earlier, had generated a ‘vehement, ironic or “scientific” condemnation of the bourgeois notion of human rights’. Throughout the 1970s, however, this condemnation had increasingly been replaced with a new human rights ideology, spurred in part by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. As has been well noted, the growing influence of Soviet dissidents helped to discredit revolutionary Marxism, clearing away a major barrier to the widespread acceptance of human rights as a progressive cause. In France, increasingly fervent attacks on Marxism coincided with the rise of what the French ‘New Philosopher’ André Glucksmann termed a ‘humanism of bad news’, which aimed to ameliorate the status quo while recasting the promise of emancipatory social transformation as totalitarian. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 384

Categorization

• XREF: This causal claim about the collapse of Marxist legitimacy feeding human-rights discourse connects to the reader’s interest in human-rights discourse and its ideological formation.
• DEFINE: Explains Glucksmann’s ‘humanism of bad news’ as a conceptual frame for post-Marxist rights ideology.