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Rights, Politics and Social Movements Guy Aitchison Cornish 1 Claiming from below: Rights, politics and social movements Guy Aitchison Cornish (UCL) Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Political Philosophy at the Department for Political Science, University College London (UCL). 2 I, Guy Aitchison Cornish, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract It is often said that many of the canonical rights we enjoy today are the achievement of past political struggle. While these struggles are typically invoked as a source of political inspiration, this thesis argues that they are also key to understanding the nature and significance of rights as a philosophical concept. The thesis marks a new contribution to the literature on rights, which is predominantly oriented to the formal analysis of rights in relation to the law and to their achievement and enforcement through the institutions of the constitutional state. Part I of the thesis sets out and defends an activist theory of rights that explains the special value the concept has as claims that empower agents with the moral standing to challenge and replace unjust laws, institutions and social practices according to critical moral norms. Part II uses the activist theory of rights as a framework to examine the strengths and weaknesses of four influential models of rights politics: the juridical model of Ronald Dworkin; the parliamentary model of Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy; the liberal civil disobedience model of John Rawls, and the radical critique of rights from within the Marxian tradition. The evaluation of these four models generates an argument in support of the legitimacy and effectiveness of activist citizenship for the achievement and enforcement of rights on the basis of democratic inclusion, moral innovation and civic education. Part III of the thesis provides an illustration of activist citizenship taken from a contemporary squatting movement centered on the right to housing, ‘Take Back the Land’. In exercising the moral right to housing, for which they demand political recognition, the group’s practices reflect the adversarial dimension of rights in keeping with the concept’s historical role in empowering subordinate groups to challenge unjust relations of power and inequality. 4 Claiming from below: Rights, politics and social movements Guy Aitchison Cornish Contents Abstract ........................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgements ......................................................................... 6 Part I ............................................................................................ 7 1, Introduction .............................................................................. 7 I) Aims and scope ......................................................................................................... 9 II) Existing literature .................................................................................................. 14 III) Method .............................................................................................................. 23 2, Rights as political claims: Core elements of an activist theory ......... 37 I) The purpose of a theory of rights ............................................................................. 38 II) Rights as valid claims ......................................................................................... 41 III) Rights as actions .............................................................................................. 48 IV) Respect and empowerment .................................................................................. 55 V) Adversarial claim-making .................................................................................... 60 VI) The role of third parties ...................................................................................... 64 VII) Objections to rights as claims ............................................................................. 66 3, Rights through action: The power and possibilities of claiming ....... 73 I) O’Neill’s claimability condition ............................................................................ 75 II) The moral status of rights .................................................................................. 79 III) The role of abstraction ....................................................................................... 83 IV) An alternative account of political agency .............................................................. 86 V) The political exercise of rights .............................................................................. 89 Part II ......................................................................................... 95 4, Rights as trumps: The juridical model ......................................... 97 I) Trumps and the power of moral condemnation ....................................................... 100 II) Political power and the threats to rights ............................................................... 105 III) Courts and the public political culture ............................................................... 111 IV) Dworkin on disobedience ................................................................................. 117 5 5, Rights as electoral proposals: The parliamentary model ............. 125 I) The political value of rights as claims .................................................................. 127 II) Rights, disagreement and ideology ...................................................................... 132 III) Citizenship beyond the law .............................................................................. 137 IV) Two interpretations of the ‘right to have rights’ ..................................................... 140 6, Rights as dissident speech: The liberal civil disobedience model .. 143 I) Disobedience and dissent .................................................................................... 144 II) Rawls’s account of civil disobedience .................................................................. 146 7, Rights as a tool of oppression: Radical scepticism towards rights . 167 I) The history and methodology of radical critique ...................................................... 170 II) The charge of individualism .............................................................................. 173 III) The charge of statism ..................................................................................... 181 IV) The charge of moralism ................................................................................... 183 V) The charge of conservatism ................................................................................ 187 Part III ...................................................................................... 191 8, Activist citizenship and the right to housing ............................... 193 I) The precarious status of the right to housing .......................................................... 194 II) Existing approaches to realising the right to housing .............................................. 199 III) Popular activism around housing ...................................................................... 203 IV) Take Back the Land ....................................................................................... 205 9, Conclusion ............................................................................. 219 Bibliography .............................................................................. 225 6 Acknowledgements I am thankful to a great many people for their advice and support during the completion of this thesis. My supervisor Cécile Laborde has been a tireless source of intelligent feedback and criticism. It is a truly great supervisor who is able to tell you what you need (though do not necessarily want!) to hear with sufficient patience and consideration to keep you motivated and I owe her a huge debt of gratitude. I would also like to thank Richard Bellamy whose work has been an important source of insight into my thinking on rights and citizenship and whose comments and kind words of encouragement as second supervisor have been invaluable. I am immensely grateful to all the staff at UCL’s Department of Political Science for their hard work and good humour, which made my whole experience that much more smooth and enjoyable. I received helpful comments and questions on this work during various stages of its progress. I would especially like to thank all the participants in our regular PhD Political Theory workshops, which provided an unmatched forum to present and debate ideas throughout my studies. Earlier work was presented at the University of Pavia Graduate Conferences in Political Philosophy, the University of Braga International Conference on Ethics and Political Philosophy, the Sciences Po, Paris Graduate Conference and Manchester University (Mancept) and I am grateful to the audiences there for comments and questions. A number of people provided helpful written comments on my work and I would like to thank Anthony Barnett, Adam Tebble, Robert Jubb, Karma Nabulsi, Nick Martin, Maeve McKeown, Sara Amighetti, Lior Erez, John Wilesmith, John Filling and two anonymous reviewers at the European Journal of Political Theory. In addition, countless informal debates and exchanges shaped the thinking behind this thesis. A great
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