Benjamin Gregg

Translating Human Rights into Muslim Vernaculars

Using Islam as an example, I show how interpreters can develop human rights within their own culture even as they draw on extra-local ideas and practices. They can do so despite points of significant conflict between the local culture and that of human rights, in ways that need to resonate with the local culture yet also challenge it. Translators can do the work they do because they have the “dual consciousness” of outside intermediaries and local participants.

Jurisprudence in an Indeterminate World: Pragmatist not Postmodern

Determinacy marks a belief in the existence, for any given law, of a “correct” meaning or “proper” application and, correspondingly, of a “right” answer to any given legal case. Indeterminacy refers to the lack of determinate knowledge of what many legal rules mean, and of how they should be applied in specific instances. A pragmatist1 jurisprudence fully embraces the phenomenon of indeterminacy. It regards legally relevant behavior and belief as products of their particular social and historical context, not of innate knowledge (as natural law2 asserts) or established authority (as Ratio Juris. Vol. 11 No. 4 December 1998 (382–98)

Politics disembodied and deterritorialized: The internet as human rights resource

Purpose – The main objective of the chapter is to map out some of the most significant possible political consequences of the Internet for the state, citizenship, human rights, and other areas. Design/methodology/approach – The chapter analyzes the phenomena at the level of sociological theory. Its theoretical scope extends to political theory. Findings – The Internet offers immense potential toward improving the nation state in terms of human rights yet in a manner that may well be foiled by several cultural, political, and economic factors. By transforming national boundaries into nongeographic borders that operate transnationally and subnationally, and by abstracting from the cybernaut’s physical body, the Internet may challenge prevailing notions of state, private property, bodily autonomy, and political personhood, all of which connect discrete bodies with bounded territories. It might free citizenship rights Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 30, 209–233 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2012)0000030012

Anti-Imperialism: Generating Universal Human Rights Out of Local Norms

To counter possibilities for human rights as cultural imperialism, (1) I develop a notion of human rights as culturally particular and valid only locally. But they are an increasingly generalizable particularism. (2) Because the incommensurability of different cultures does not entail an uncritical tolerance of just about anything, but rather allows for an objectivating stance toward other communities or cultures, locally valid human rights have a critical capacity. (3) Locally valid human rights promote a communitys self-representation and thus allow for diversity, rejecting the coercive (mis)representation of a community or culture as incapable of representing itself.

Deploying Cognitive Sociology to Advance Human Rights

No one, neither speculative philosopher nor empirical anthropologist, has ever shown human rights to be anything other than a culturally particular social construction. If human rights are not natural, divine, or metaphysical, then they can only be a social construction of particular cultures. If so, then many cultures may justifiably reject them as culturally foreign and hence without local normative validity. In response to this conclusion I develop a cognitive approach to any local culture ‐ a cognitive approach in distinction to a normative one. It allows for advancing human rights as rights internal to any given community’s culture. Human rights can be advanced internally by means of “cognitive re-framing,” a notion I develop out of Erving Goffman’s theory of frame analysis. I deploy it in two examples: female genital mutilation in Africa and child prostitution in Asia.

Human Rights as Metaphor for Political Community beyond the Nation State

One generally enjoys rights, if at all, then only as a member of a particular political community. The nation state’s territorial sovereignty precludes the possibility of human rights. I propose a ‘human rights state’ whose members seek the corresponding nation state’s embrace of human rights. It functions as a metaphor with ‘deontic power’, with each member carrying these deontic powers in a ‘human rights backpack’. Metaphorical thinking is more plausible than theology or metaphysics on the approach I adopt: social construction. Accordingly, all norms are human inventions and at best emerge through ongoing self-reflective politics: rejected or embraced on the basis of critical examination and justification. Creating justice begins with an act of imagination, envisioning better alternatives, and resisting taking for granted many aspects of the communities we are born into. Metaphorical thinking facilitates creating justice in this sense: limiting the sovereignty of the nation state to the extent necessary to allow for human rights.

Teaching Human Rights in the College Classroom as a Cognitive Style

Every social and political order produces norms and depends on their widespread observance over time. A pervasive aspect of social life is the individual’s binding himself or herself to these norms. He or she is unlikely to be motivated by some conscious, reflected conviction about the value of highly organized social life. He or she is unlikely to have made a conscious choice to embrace life in a social order. Rather, such a life is functionally necessary in immediate ways, for securing an ordered existence, steady employment, health care, economic exchange, and so forth. No one need appeal to some transcendent entity, theological or metaphysical, to find reasons or motivations to participate in the system of norms that any political community constitutes. Norms need to be generalized throughout a community to bind it, much as communication requires generalized symbols, languages, vocabularies, and understandings as a condition of the very possibility of communication, inasmuch as the “situations of ego and alter are never completely identical. It follows that the range of possible communication varies with symbolic generalizations, i.e., can increase or decrease” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 327).

Comparative Perspectives on Social Integration in Pluralistic Societies: Thick Norms versus Thin

AbstractI address major challenges to dealing with contentious public issues by replacing thick norms with thin ones: (1) Secularism, individual liberty, equal rights, and rule of law lend themselves to politics more thin than thick; does this condemn the approach to its own kind of thickness? (2) If the unit of analysis is the individual, and if the individual’s primary project is his or her liberty, must this approach threaten the communitarian self-understandings of some groups? (3) Does it fundamentalize political liberalism? (4) What about addressees likely to reject thin norms, such as persons guided by an otherworldly authority or an authoritarian ideology? (5) Is this approach defeated where territorialized membership rights clash with thin norms, for example in the European Union: a political and economic community internally somewhat thin yet externally thick?

Enlightened localism in comparative perspective

Abstract I introduce the fi ve articles in this special issue of Comparative Sociology as each applies the theory of enlightened localism. First I outline the theory in question and then highlight those aspects that each of the authors deploys, the criticisms each levels at it, and the suggestions each off ers toward its improvement. Lea Ypi applies the theory to human rights in a way that might reconcile universal norms with the need for individual motivation that can only be local. Jonathan White uses the theory to develop a conception of the European Union that would pre-serve rather than, as now, repress the partisan politicking at the core of democracy. Junmin Wang fi nds the theory helpful in analyzing the unintended decentraliza-tion of political power in China as a consequence of recent economic reforms. Ko Hasegawa seeks an enlightened loyalist solution to the problematic integration of a minority population into mainstream Japanese society. Manuel Ahedo enlists the theory in combating ghettoized schooling all too typical for immigrant chil-dren in Europe with ideas for integrating the children of immigrants with those of long-established residents. I conclude by listing some of the questions raised by the articles and to be addressed by future research – concerns that might move an enlightened localist approach forward.

The Search for "Normality" in the Relationship between Germans and Jews

It was nothing other than the destruction ofintellectual freedom thatfirst made Auschwitz possible. Even more disgraceful is the fact that precisely those who should know better curtail and torpedo intellectualfreedom. At this point all tolerance whatsoever ceases. TheJews, too, must be told that intellectual and artistic freedom is indivisable and that no group within the community may claim special privileges.