Legitim och illegitim politisering av mänskliga rättigheter : Kritiska perspektiv i ljuset av arendtiansk politisk etik

In light of contemporary reevaluation of liberal norms marked by the populist right-wing politicization of human rights discourse, this thesis introduces the notions of legitimate and illegitimate politicization as tools for ethical critique. Aiming to understand what it means to confront this development in moral terms and its implications for democratic practices, I approach the political thought of Hannah Arendt as a form of political ethics by drawing on Sophie Loidolt’s interpretations of Arendt that identify an inherent ethics within the notion of the political itself. First, I argue that we can attribute to Arendt a form of political realism insofar as this inherent ethics justifies an ethical dualism that expresses the normative demand for moral principles in the private domain to be subordinated to the conditions of political intersubjectivity. In assessing its validity, I maintain that it avoids the “realistic mistake,” and from the viewpoint of these conditions, retains a critical distance in a manner that Carl-Henric Grenholm’s recent elaborations of critical ethical monism fail to achieve. Second, I relate these findings to Arendt’s controversial distinctions between the social and political, as well as her distinction between prejudice and ideology, to clarify the implications of such a position in political ethics. I conclude by defining legitimate politicization as that which dispels prejudice, and illegitimate politicization as the institutionalization of prejudice. Conceived within the broader framework of Arendtian realism, it allows us to critically examine how, when, and why the politicization of human rights discourse exceeds ethical boundaries, without dispensing with the proprietary logic of the political.