Constituting the Human Community:

Democracy, Human Rights and Global Justice

James Bohman

Saint Louis University

Abstract

Democracy and human rights are strongly connected in many philosophical works and in many international covenants and international law. While they are commonly thought to be not only theoretically and practically compatible, this assumption hides some deep inconsistencies, particularly with regard to political rights as human rights. In this paper I consider the peculiar status of universal political rights and show why they require a quite different relationship between human rights and democracy than the standard picture. First, I consider the nature of political rights. I argue that such rights are the basis for legitimate claims to the political community as a whole, and that this is the core of democratic self-rule. Second, I argue that human political rights on this understanding require that humanity constitutes one such political community to be addressed by those who suffer from human rights violations. The third and fourth steps in the argument conceptualize the human community as a requirement of nondomination and human political rights. While many have thought of such a cosmopolitan requirement in terms of sheer size and extension, it is rather a matter of realizing differentiated political structures, of polities within polities with multiple domains, sites and levels. It must also offer the possibility that such structures are able to undergo profound democratic revision. Thus, a political community so organized around the differentiation and constitutionalization of human political rights cannot become the “soulless despotism” that Kant feared in the world state. The European Union provides a good illustration of this sort of new, transnational constitutionalism oriented to providing the democratic means to overcome legal domination as well as new “multiperspectival” forms of deliberation and inquiry. At the very least, the peculiar status of universal political rights and of the human political community entailed by them helps us to rethink the relationship between democracy, rights, and freedom.