Imagining Human Rights

Sebastian Wogenstein

Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade

In his seminal work Making Sense of Human Rights, James W. Nickel argues that, “human rights, as we know them today, are the rights of the lawyers, not the rights of the philosophers” (Nickel 2007, p. 7). Nickel, a professor of law and philosophy, points to the specificity of the rights found in the declarations, conventions, and other treaties that make up today’s international human rights framework, as opposed to the broad and abstract concepts that dominated the philosophical discourse on human rights in the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, our pre -sent-day human rights as legal concepts do not depend on the acceptance ...