Wendy Brown: The Most We Can Hope For
In the essay “The Most We Can Hope For” by Wendy Brown, the author makes important points when arguing that human rights are not only to protect individuals from violence and abuse because it is situated in a political, social, historical, and economic contexts. On page 453 She states that human rights are a political tactic with an image of justice, meaning that political uses the image of justice in this case the human rights to keep up or to gain more power in another ways. However, when talking about defending individuals from cruelty, and avoiding pain and suffering, this takes a moral progress. For me what she is claiming is that political power will always be present in human rights even though it presents itself as antipolitical. Like the example of the intervention in Iraq by the United States and Britain, which shows the replacement of an abusive power by another one in exchange of protection, with the hope of reducing suffering, but at the end the power is still there in other form.
Ignatieff insists that what human beings need to enjoy life is a political-economic account of what state needs to thrive instead of the basic things such as food and shelter. This shows again that political power and its political and economic security is all that matters. In his second claim he argues that a crucial initiative for free market order human rights offers because they are the vehicle for social and economic security, in other words from my understanding he is trying to say that through human rights individuals can achieve many things, even be able to take a part on political and social contexts because human rights guarantee social and political freedom allowing individuals to have agency and therefore it is up to the individual his aims and ends (455). Here we are talking about freedom or empowerment where the individual makes his own decisions.
From what I read, for Brown, human rights are not only shield that protect individuals agains power and permit individuals to make choices but they could be ways and vehicles to reach domination and governance. For instance the fact that Americans have so many rights, even if these can not shape collective power, still this allows Americans to live without fear which makes human rights be a form a power itself . Furthermore “there is no such a thing as mere reduction of suffering or protection from abuse” (460), this alone is productive of political subjects. I agree with Brown that the human rights activism is not only a “pure defense of the innocent and powerless”, it is more than that simple quote. it actually enable us to live fearless of oppression not only that but also feel protected and be able to speak up about what we think is infair even defying people in politics.
