Rights Talk
Hollenbach, David
WANTED: A NEW PUBLIC LANGUAGE RIGHTS TALK The Impoverishment of Political Discourse Mary Ann Glendon The Free Press, $22.95, 218 pp. David Hollenbach his is an excellent post-cold war book....
...It should be quickly pointed out that Glendon is not arguing for the state socialism so spectacularly discredited in the last three years...
...So both Germany and France have constitutional provisions that guarantee the conditions for individuals to enter into a rich social existence in freedom...
...characters and stories come vibrantly alive...
...In the American tradition, under the influence of the English political philosopher John Locke, the right to property was the paradigmatic right...
...The only nonstate form of community the Court seems to be able to bring into focus is the corporation viewed as a legal person endowed with rights...
...Supreme Court, however, has difficulty dealing with the forms of commu662: Commonweal [ " F a s c i n a t i n g . . . A m b i t i o u s . . . Ecumenical...
...For example, judicial discussions of the role of the family in public life increasingly dissolve into claims about the rights of individuals...
...The West German Constitutional Court had recently declared that the state is obliged not only to meet the subsistence needs of German citizens, but to stimulate the social conditions that enable or empower individuals to pursue a dignified life...
...French constitutional law provides that "the nation shall ensure to the individual and the family the conditions necessary to their development...
...sometimes it has an accent often heard in neoconservative circles in the U.S...
...Rather she wants to change the way citizens and especially lawyers and judges speak this language...
...These rights-claims, she says, are absolutist, hyperindividualist, and independent of considerations of responsibility toward the common good...
...Glendon is worried that American life is increasingly forced into a grid framed by individual freedom or oppressive communal control...
...It resists being ideologically pigeonholed...
...Over the past half century, appeals to rights have become the principal way of addressing issues of public morality--from womb to tomb...
...I wish she were clearer on where the power of the government is needed to implement the rhetoric of solidarity she wants to hear in law and in public discourse...
...ISBN 0-8007-3023-2 $9.95 paperback THE ENCYCLOPLD A OF ~/~:~i~ a^^n...
...Its use shall also serve the public weal...
...The labor laws enacted in the 1930s supported unions and collective bargaining, but recent Court decisions make no reference to the importance of this associational activity and often subordinate it to the rights of individuals...
...200,000 sold previously...
...It has become increasingly prominent in recent jurisprudence (e.g., Roe v. Wade...
...Glendon believes with Aristotle that the law has an educational function...
...is becoming mute on this crucial arena of solidarity...
...Just as Eastern Europe is rediscovering the importance of a strong civil society as a precondition of freedom, the language of the law in the U.S...
...Drawing on her expertise in comparative law (which she teaches at Harvard Law School), Glendon points to France, Germany, and Canada to show that rights can be invoked in a way more compatible with concern for the common good than is the case in this country...
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...In 1957 the German Bundesgerichtshof declared the development of personality consists "precisely in the individual's reaching out beyond himself' in relationships with others...
...Instead of a right to privacy that barricades the individual against the world, German and French basic law affirms the right to the development of "personality...
...The book makes a very important contribution to the effort to find an idiom to speak of a simultaneous concem for both freedom and solidarity that Americans can begin to understand...
...The similarities between Glendon's argument and the recent papal and episcopal discussions of the moral core of public life are evident, even though they are left implicit in her text...
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...Rights talk today is both a cause and symptom of such confusion, eminently suited for politics via sound bite and bumper sticker...
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...The sociality that is missing from American rights talk is not achieved exclusively or even primarily through government...
...Such language stands in stark contrast to chronic American aversion to the idea that rights are positive empowerments rather than simply negative freedoms "to be let alone...
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...But perhaps this reluctance to make the issue of state intervention central is just what we need to break out of the constricted rhetoric shaped by the forty-year, East-West conflict...
...Glendon does not want to abolish talk of rights from public discourse...
...Glendon argues that the influence of such ideas led Germany and France to synthesize classical ideas of the common good and biblical understandings of stewardship and concern for the vulnerable with Enlightenment ideas of freedom...
...Over 140 exquisite full color illustrations...
...She offers numerous specific examples of how an enrichment of the American rhetoric of rights by the language of solidarity might be brought about...
...In contrast to Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau insisted that property rights are subordinate to the overriding claims of the community, that owners are trustees for the public good, and that human beings have a right to basic subsistence...
...III ISBN 0-8007-3027-5 $14.95 paper Three volume set ISBN 0-8007-3029-1 $39.95 paper An Imprint of Gleneida Publishing Group 120 White Plains Road, Tarrytown, NY 10591 For orders: 1-800-631-1970 Fax: 914-3328661 nity that stand between the individual and the state...
...On the European continent, this solidarity appears concretely in areas such as economic support for children and for women facing abortion decisions or divorce, in health-care systems, in approaches to unemployment, retraining for new jobs, and the provision of necessities for the weak and vulnerable...
...The "fine texture" of a civil society composed of families, neighborhoods, schools, groups at the workplace, labor unions, churches, and many other communities is as important to the development of personhood as is political community...
...This language is unable to deal with the thickening web of interdependence linking persons with each other and with the natural environment...
...At issue is whether the United States can and should learn something from the stronger sense of solidarity present in other democracies...
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...Glendon's defense of solidarity in civil society sometimes echoes the language of European social democracy...
...Glendon argues that the language of rights used by the American founders to knit together a religiously and culturally diverse republic has lately become a divisive force...
...Vol...
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...The book is an appreciative but strongly critical assessment of "rights talk" in the United States today...
...For example, the 1949 Basic Law of West Germany states both that "property and the right of inheritance shall be guaranteed," and that "property imposes duties...
...More fundamentally, her argument shows that it would be premature to declare that the "American way" has been unambiguously vindicated by the downfall of totalitarian oppression...
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...Because we lack a public language that enables us to address communal relatedness with clarity, the social dimension of our existence has become confused and torn by conflict...
...Mirabile dictu, she thinks that, somehow, Western Europe may yet be more Christian than the United States, at least in its legal self-understandings...
...Through careful comparative analy sis of the legal systems of the North Atlantic nations, it demonstrates that there is more than one way to organize a successful democracy...
...The U.S...
...So she calls for a recovery of the language of responsibility to the good of civil society in legal and political discourse...
...Despite important evolution in the law, the idea that rights define a sphere of unimpeded individual autonomy is alive and well in the right to privacy or the "right to be let alone," which Harvard Law Dean Erwin Griswold proclaimed to be "the underlying theme of the Bill of Rights...
...664: Commonweal...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
