Abstract

The most interesting and promising development in recent years in French political philosophy is a renewed consensual reflection on rights. This development was made possible by the breakdown of Marxist theory in France in the mid-1970s. Within the broader framework of the "return of the political" in French political theory, the "return of the juridical" has also taken place. Two interrelated kinds of debates are characteristic of this reappraisal of rights. One is identified with attempts at clarifying the relationship between rights and politics. The other focuses on the significance of the rights of man for envisioning a "post"-metaphysical philosophy of right capable of sustaining the values commonly associated with liberal democracy. Among the efforts of the latter kind, special attention should be paid to Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's juridical humanism which understands itself as a Kantian liberal political theory intended to be at once nonmetaphysical and nonhistoricist. Ferry and Renaut's work shows clearly that the main task of contemporary political philosophy is to recuperate the notion of a transcendent right. But this can be possible only by finding a passageway between Marx and Heidegger, or in other words, between Revolution and Deconstruction