"Regenerative Politics argues that rights in contemporary liberal democracies are neither self-evident, "inalienable," or universal. Critiques from both Left and Right are challenging a political order that is not of their own making. Ostensibly protectors of freedom, rights in modern politics instead function as foreclosures of human self-determination. What is called for is a regenerative politics that accepts all human claims against political convention as self-determinative-including the rejection of rights or the ...
Read More
"Regenerative Politics argues that rights in contemporary liberal democracies are neither self-evident, "inalienable," or universal. Critiques from both Left and Right are challenging a political order that is not of their own making. Ostensibly protectors of freedom, rights in modern politics instead function as foreclosures of human self-determination. What is called for is a regenerative politics that accepts all human claims against political convention as self-determinative-including the rejection of rights or the overturning of liberal democracies themselves, a radical politics that abandons any presumptive assurance that rights won can never be lost. Bringing together contemporary scholarship on race, democracy, liberalism, and fascism in Europe and America with an intellectual history of modern revolution, democratic agency, and a novel account of human nature, Emma Planinc offers a new theory for the revitalization of politics. While it is not without risk, a regenerative politics is the only way for liberal democracies to resist increasingly extreme challenges to their legitimacy; they must be perpetually open to both the full reconstitution of rights and freedoms and the omnipresent possibility of their loss. A true regenerative politics remains open to all political futures even while acknowledging that rights and freedoms are contingent on their fragility in the face of self-determinative human attempts to make and remake the political order"--
Read Less
