夺回型主体性的内在焦虑与外部投射——理解当代西方政治的新视角

Abstract: Is the contemporary West's persistent emphasis on human rights merely the triumphant fruit of the Enlightenment? This paper proposes an analytical perspective grounded in "Productive Political Philosophy": precisely because Western human rights subjectivity is "reclaimed"—gradually wrested back during a protracted struggle against Christian theocracy—it harbors a lingering, indeterminate anxiety after completing the structural transition at the level of public legitimacy. Has humanity truly no need of God? Has theocracy been thoroughly subsumed? Having reclaimed dominion over public power, the West has lost the eternal coordinate system of the public sphere. This vacuum of moral relativism is the deep spiritual root of the contemporary West's internal cultural fragmentation and proliferating identity politics, manifesting as the persistent tug-of-war between progressivism and conservatism—not a negotiable conflict of interests, but a "culture war" lacking a common frame of reference. Externally, this anxiety drives the West to continuously scrutinize the governance models of non-Western political entities through the standard of "human rights," using them as a foil to reflect its own subjectivity. This paper further traces the theoretical resonances of this perspective across Eastern and Western academia, systematically responds to scholars with opposing views, and demonstrates the unique contributions of the "Productive Political Philosophy" framework in terms of systemic, symmetrical, and dynamic analysis. The nature of the argument: the core analysis is a logical deduction based on the theoretical framework; the dialogue with existing theories is a framework-based comparison grounded in the literature.