"Sober Drunkenness": A Review of Kennedy's Critique of the Human Rights Movement

Human rights are often considered part of a leftist agenda. In an article for 2002 Harvard Human Rights Journal, David Kennedy – himself a “compassionate legal professional” whose political conviction is on the left of the spectrum – famously asked the question whether the human rights movement is “part of the problem” rather than the solution.

Kennedy’s critique focuses on the professional culture of the human rights movement. He argues that the human rights discourse dictates a vocabulary that makes other emancipatory projects likely to remain unheard; a vocabulary that blinds out other forms of suffering, such as suffering caused by private actors. His concern is that the human rights discourse attempts to cure the symptoms instead of addressing the causes. (One could perhaps interpret Kennedy as saying that the human rights discourse works as a kind of ‘opium for the people’, forcing them to translate their suffering into the language of legal claims rather than into concrete political action). Finally, Kennedy takes issue with the “18th through 20th century [Western] liberalism” embodied in the concept of human rights.

In his recent book entitled “The Dark Sides of Virtue”, Kennedy has further elaborated his theory. Alexandra Kemmerer, a German researcher at Würzburg University and a member of the editorial board of the German Law Journal, recently published a lucid and beautifully written review of Kennedy’s book in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Kemmerer convincingly argues that it would be wrong to light-heartedly give up the discourse of international human rights law as a whole. This – imperfect – “conversation of public international law” is a necessary pre-condition for the rational balancing of costs and benefits that Kennedy suggests.