A post-Hegelian theory of human rights: beyond recognition and the state

Abstract

This article develops a post-Hegelian social and political theory of human rights. To do this, it moves past two legacies that can be traced back to Hegel’s philosophy: his theory of recognition and his views about the embeddedness of rights within states. IR often misinterprets Hegel’s recognition theory as applying within a public world of state action. However, Hegel argues that recognition occurs before rather than within a social world. Instead, I show how and why Hegel’s analysis of Sophocles’ play Antigone is a more fruitful starting point for theorising contemporary international practices. I mobilise a Hegelian social ontology of ‘ethical life’ and a post-Hegelian critique of statism and Eurocentrism to argue that human rights should be understood as an independent field of action in which agency is embedded, rather than as a practice that is tied to sovereignty and states. Several conclusions about the ontology and epistemology of human rights stem from this analysis. Human rights practice brings forms of action and obligation into being. It enables collective (not only individual) action. It requires the exercise of humility rather than hubris. Finally, it invites a discussion of how agents can bridge external and internal perspectives to evaluate the actions that seem to be required by their practices. This critical exploration and re-interpretation of Hegel’s early work corrects IR’s tendency to use his later and more statist writings to locate and concretise the grounds for ethics.

Introduction

Hegel’s social and political thought has had a deep influence on how we theorise agency, structure, responsibility and social ontology in politics and International Relations (IR). In the sub-field of global ethics, the two most influential Hegelian ideas are first his theory of recognition, and second his theory of the embeddedness of rights within particularly constituted states and communities (Hegel, 1991, 2018). Given the influence of these ideas, it is significant that they seem fundamentally incompatible with contemporary human rights, which has become one of the world’s most significant ethical discourses and practices. This incompatibility seems to arise for two reasons, which cut deeper than Hegel’s (1991) more general critique of abstract, pre-social notions of right (see also Alznauer, 2008; Taylor, 1985a). First, recognition in a real social world can only meaningfully come from a position of hierarchy and power, whereas human rights practice involves a radical commitment to the equality of each person. For contemporary human rights theory, equality starts with seeing oneself as equal, irrespective of recognition by others (Phillips, 2015). Second, states and communities, even in ideal theory, can be oppressive for individuals who do not fit into the universal norms and standards that are circumscribed within them. This article develops and agrees with these critiques. However, rather than reverting to the forms of abstract rationalism that Hegel so effectively critiqued, it then moves forward from within (rather than outside of) a broadly Hegelian social ontology. It builds a post-Hegelian social and political theory of human rights. This article achieves this through refreshing and updating a Hegelian approach to action and agency, and by moving beyond the conservative implications of a focus on recognition theory and sovereign states. Human rights are typically viewed as a form of domestic or legal-constitutional ordering, which function through state obligations and social power. By contrast, this article argues that human rights are a form of international ordering, which exist on a transnational scale, and which function through the constitutive role (based on structural power) that they play in agency, obligation and action.

This argument is developed in four steps. In the first section, I set up the research problem by tracking Hegel’s influence on the contemporary field of global ethics, first through recognition theory, and second through the theorisation of rights as embedded within states. I argue that these two Hegelian ideas are difficult to combine with a human rights perspective, which is normatively underpinned by a ‘claim and commitment’ (Phillips, 2015) to equality. In the second section, I begin to respond to this problem. I start by evaluating the real purpose of the theory of recognition, as it appears in Hegel’s (2018) first book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. ¹ In IR, the famous master-servant dialectic is frequently misinterpreted as applying to an actual historical, material or social situation. However, when reading the original text, rather than relying on secondary interpretations that over-emphasise the materialist themes of labour, death and struggle (Pippin, 2001: 11), it becomes clear that this dialectic’s true purpose is to establish secure knowledge of the self and others, in the context of a broader exercise in the foundations of epistemology and metaphysics. This is interesting on its own terms. However, it also means that recognition theory is less relevant – or at least differently relevant – to political analysis involving an actual public, social world of action, as compared to many of its typical applications in politics and IR.

The article’s third section identifies a stronger starting point. Further downstream in the argument of the Phenomenology, Hegel develops a theory of action, agency and obligation, through an analysis of Sophocles’ (1982) play Antigone. This territory has been less thoroughly explored in international political theory. ² This is especially true as compared to his later account of ‘ethical life’ in the Philosophy of Right in which he circumscribes rights within historically concrete institutions such as the modern state. Instead, I show the significant value that can be added by exploring Hegel’s earlier account of ethical practices in the Phenomenology. Hegel interprets Antigone in terms of a tragic conflict between two sources of obligation that become irreconcilable in the world of action: the family and the polis. Hegel’s analysis of how agency is embedded within practices provides a powerful basis for a social ontology of human rights, by allowing human rights to be theorised as one of these multiple sources of obligation that co-exist in the self and the world. The key features of this analysis – the insider/outsider duality of the play’s audience in judging the characters’ self-described obligations (which Hegel fails to identify), the multiplicity of practices, the non-hierarchical relationship of these multiple practices, and how practices become ‘actual in the self’ ³ – build directly towards the article’s subsequent theorisation of human rights as a practice. In making this argument, this article can be viewed as a response to Erskine’s and Lebow’s (2012b: 199–207) invitation for international political theorists to make better use of the genre of tragedy.

The fourth section re-theorises human rights, in a way that rejects the necessity of their embeddedness within states. Mainstream theories of human rights view them as constitutive rules, or regulative rules, or abstract values. By contrast, a post-Hegelian approach theorises human rights as a dynamic transnational practice, or field of action – analogous to the family or the polis in Antigone – within which agency and obligation are embedded. Practices such as human rights can be changed and re-constructed, as agents act and choose within them. Moreover, it is a practice in its own right: one that exists separately to and beyond the state, instead of needing to be understood in relation to and in opposition with sovereignty. Mainstream human rights scholarship tends to emphasise the centrality of state actors, intergovernmental organisations and elite non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Beitz (2009: 8, 13–27, 109, 128), for example, explicitly defines human rights practice in a doubly statist way: statist in terms of who the main duty-bearers are, and statist in its intergovernmental conception of the ‘international’ level at which the practice and its normativity operate. ⁴ Instead of looking first to the society of states as the central context, this article’s post-Hegelian theorisation of human rights starts with a transnational and translocal scale, which brings into focus ‘different actors as knowledge producers and stakeholders of human rights’ (Madhok, 2022: 13–14). The international itself can thereby be viewed as constituted by our multiple practices, which co-exist in the self and the world, rather than only by our multiple states and/or societies (compare Rosenberg, 2016).

The prefix ‘post’ in ‘post-Hegelian’ does not suggest a binary opposition of the kind that IR scholars might associate with mutually inimical positions such as positivism and post-positivism. In the existing literature, the phrase ‘post-Hegelian’ is typically associated with the adoption of some of Hegel’s arguments in the absence of subscription to his entire philosophical system (Mather, 2002: 695); and/or with work in the broad tradition of Hegel that – despite being in this tradition – nevertheless critiques and re-constructs one or more of his ideas, or rejects some of his ideas while adopting others (Canivez, 2019; McCumber, 1988; Stark, 2014). ‘Post-’ is a temporal modifier signalling ‘after’. What one therefore cannot do from a post-Hegelian perspective is to respond to any flaws in his thinking by going back to the forms of abstract rationalism and atomised individualism which were the primary objects of his critique.

Hegel and human rights

This section identifies two patterns of Hegelian thought that have significantly contributed to the field of contemporary global ethics. It then considers how each strand seems to go against the purpose of contemporary human rights. The first pattern is his theory of recognition, based on the famous dialectic of the master and the servant in the Phenomenology (Hegel, 2018). Here is the best-known version of this dialectic: a narrative which often stems from Kojève’s (1969) interpretation of the Phenomenology rather than from direct engagement with the original text. ⁵ Two conscious beings encounter each other for the first time, and become driven to destroy each other in a misguided bid to secure the self. These beings start off as formally equal, but in an abstract sense that is utterly devoid of any content. They then assume the substantive, hierarchically ordered identities of master and servant, after one decides to succumb to the other to avoid death. However, in a relationship between a master and a servant, the identity – and certainty of one’s place in the world – of neither party is stable. This is because each cannot exist as a human subject without the recognition of the other. The servant can see certain human features of the master on display, for example, autonomy and free will. However, the master typically fails to see these human features, or even their possibility, in the servant. This imbalance of recognition is easily (and correctly) interpreted as being particularly problematic for the servant. However, it is ultimately problematic for the master too. It is problematic for the master because only another human could possibly be capable of recognising the humanity in the master. By not recognising the humanity in the servant, the master is left without the possibility of recognition of the humanity in himself. This imbalance engenders a constant ‘struggle for recognition’ (Honneth, 1995), involving both sides, which becomes the source of social conflict. It is only through equal and mutual recognition that both masters and servants can resolve or prevent such conflict. Through this resolution, the master and servant identities themselves that were at the root of the struggle also become transformed.

This idea has been incorporated into theories of humanitarianism and human rights, by scholars who treat recognition as a solution to the marginalised status of others. Barnett’s (2011) authoritative critical history of global humanitarian practices identifies how 18th- and 19th-centuries anti-slavery campaigners had to combat a widespread racist view that Africans were ‘not even capable of registering pain’ (p. 36). Dunant’s (1947) A Memory of Solferino, originally published in 1862, is viewed by scholars and practitioners of humanitarianism as an early example of how to combat such a view. Dunant’s book chronicles the similar bodily vulnerability of both European and African wounded soldiers, thereby enabling recognition of a human sameness. Radice (2019) builds on this by arguing that a focus on equally human bodies provides a partial and somewhat problematic picture. Humanitarians have been equally – and at times more – interested in the recognition of an equally human soul or self (Radice, 2019). The evangelicals who are typically cast in Eurocentric narratives as the early humanitarians were especially interested in saving souls from going to hell. Recognising non-Europeans as potential Christians figures them as ‘backward’ and incomplete in the present, while simultaneously generating an imperative to act to actualise their equal humanity in the future (Barnett, 2011: 56). These illustrations capture a broader dynamic. Humanitarian campaigners believed – and still believe – in the strategic importance of countering perceptions or non-humanity or sub-humanity, as necessary early step that can enable progress on further objectives. This is a discourse of recognition.

The concept of recognition is less prominent within human rights theory as compared to its omnipresence within international humanitarianism; nevertheless, there have been a few significant contributions. One example is Hayden’s (2012) research, which uses the example of the human right to health in South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic to show how recognition constitutes (human) rights. Rights are not, on this view, pre-social features of atomised individuals (Hayden, 2012; see also Brincat, 2017). Instead, human rights only exist when we collectively bring them into being, by seeing them in specific others through the attribution of a socio-political status as rights-holders. However, this is ultimately problematic from the perspective of human rights practice’s commitment to substantive equality – to seeing oneself as equal – irrespective of recognition or misrecognition in the actual social world. Phillips (2015) elegantly encapsulates the problem:

In the emblematic medallion created by Josiah Wedgwood for the Society of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, the slave appeals to us in the language of human equality – ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ – but he does so as a supplicant, from a kneeling position. (pp. 6–8)

This illustrates how recognition is fundamentally embedded within practices of hierarchy rather than within practices of equality (Zarakol, 2018: 853). It happens from a position of power. Hayden (2012: 581–584) himself points out how powerful actors such as states and pharmaceutical companies can recognise rights and rights-holders according to a conservative framing of property rights, rather than according to progressive, radical or political framings of human rights’ meaning and purpose. The struggle, the misrecognition, the master-slave identities: these are constitutive parts of the process of recognition that cannot easily be ‘skipped’ and may never be fully resolved. However, the idea of human rights places great emphasis on people demanding what is owed to them in the here and now: on being the kinds of actors who are theorised as capable of acting politically even – and especially – if powerful others fail to appreciate their equality and their rights (Phillips, 2015). Rendering vulnerable populations as logically dependent upon recognition by more powerful others for their equality and their agency is therefore challenging to accept from a human rights perspective.

The second pattern of Hegelian thought that has influenced contemporary global ethics is his view that rights can only meaningfully exist inside of properly constituted states (Brown, 1991, 1999). This idea contributed significantly to the cosmopolitan-communitarian debate, which became especially prominent in the 1980s and 1990s as a way to capture key fault lines in international political theory (Brown, 1992). Communitarians believe that states and their borders have moral significance, because of the ethical life that is made possible within them (Walzer, 1977, 1983). They see communities, not just individuals, as sources of ethical life and value (Cochran, 1999: 12). While these ideas clearly have longer standing roots, for example, in the work of Aristotle, it is Hegel’s critique of Enlightenment thinking through which they have come forward into the present (MacIntyre, 1985). As Pinkard (2007: 216) explains, far from criticising the liberal concept of the individual who is free to author his own commitments, Hegel thought of this as a normative achievement in history. Instead, he was critical of the Kantian tendency to abstract this idea away from its context. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right aims to answer the question ‘Under what practical, social and institutional setup can something like the “liberal individual” be secured’ (Pinkard, 2007: 217). His answer is the modern state, which he says provides an institutional context for the realisation of rights in a way that the family, civil society and earlier forms of socio-political organisation cannot (Hegel, 1991; see also Molloy, 2022: 508).

Despite being presented as an attempt to synthesise the idea of rights with the practices and institutions of sovereignty, this second pattern of thought also faces clear problems of compatibility with a contemporary human rights framework. First and most obviously, this theorisation frames the non-European modes of socio-political organisation that existed in Hegel’s time as more ‘primitive’, as less modern and as less conducive to ‘ethical life’; Hegel’s institutionally mediated universalism looks and feels very white, European and masculine (Fanon, 2008; Mills, 1996b; Narayan, 1995). Furthermore, through their participation in and identification with this whole, people can realise that they are also its authors. For Hegelians, this is meant to constitute the possibility of rights and freedom. However, universal standards, especially when instantiated within concrete communities, can also be oppressive for those who do not fit in to the norm (see more broadly Weber, 2016). For example, families, communities, states and cultures are all structures that allow oppression based on gender to persist (Okin, 1989). This insight applies even more strongly to sexual and gender minorities, for whom the ‘universal’ or ‘whole’ community can represent a set of oppressive and hostile norms. Hegel believed that individuals who feel alienated from their (otherwise well constituted) societies ‘can be reconciled to their social world by being shown that its institutions are inherently rational’ (Neuhouser, 2000: 116, see also p. 243). This merely illustrates the same problem in a different register. The role accorded to reason in resolving failures to align one’s own self with the universal relies heavily on what critical human rights theory now recognises as a hegemonic and contested notion of the ‘human’ (Brown, 2015; Kapur, 2018; Odysseos, 2023): one that, by centring a certain conception of rational man, excludes the forms of value pluralism and epistemic pluralism that many post-Hegelian scholars now aim towards (Rush, 2007: 107–108). The point of this article is not to resolve questions about whether such interpretations are properly Hegelian, or whether these ideas from later in his life represent a sharp break from his early work (see Pippin, 2008: 183–209). ⁶ The point, instead, is to establish that turning to under-explored ideas from Hegel’s Phenomenology – which is incontrovertibly less institutionalist – can provide resources that avoid the problems that communitarian interpretations of the Philosophy of Right may generate for human rights as a contemporary international practice.

For embodied people in the real world, it is often only by breaking out of the communities and cultures – and sometimes even families – into which they were born that they can feel truly safe and liberated. As the state cannot be ‘broken out of’ as easily as natural or chosen communities, this line of thought makes Hegel’s valorisation of the state and its institutions particularly problematic from a human rights perspective (see also Kaufman, 1997). Gender equality, LGBTQI+ rights, postcolonial justice and ensuring that the vulnerable have (and are theorised as fully having) a voice to speak up for themselves, are all centrally important concerns within contemporary human rights practice. However, these priorities seem incompatible with the homogenising, universalising political communities that Hegel views as ethically necessary and as bounded by states. Overall, this section has established reasons to believe that the two most significant Hegelian contributions to contemporary global ethics, the theory of recognition and the theory of the embeddedness of rights within communities and states, have conservative and ethically problematic implications when viewed from a human rights perspective. Does this mean that Hegel does not mix with contemporary human rights?

Recognition theory is about the self, not the social

This article’s first step towards answering ‘no’ to that question is to argue that the purpose of recognition theory is often misinterpreted. This is particularly reflected in IR theory. IR scholars tend to take the master-servant dialectic outside the context of its function in the broader argument of Phenomenology, treating it as a standalone theory. Once isolated in this way, it is applied to real historical and social situations, such as states’ representations of other states in their foreign-policy narratives, or the material, social and political struggles of the less powerful to be seen as equals (Buck-Morss, 2000; Duncombe, 2016; Epstein et al., 2018; Kochi, 2016; Ringmar, 2002). Interpretations of the master–servant dialectic that view it through historical-materialist or postcolonial lenses tend to assume that it refers to actual practices of mastery and slavery, or to actual social struggles in history (Buck-Morss, 2000; Fanon, 2008; Kochi, 2016; Kojève, 1969). As Pippin (2001) says,

Some very influential commentators . . . pay almost no attention to the first three chapters [of the Phenomenology]. They write as if we should isolate the Self-Consciousness chapter as a free-standing philosophical anthropology: a theory of the inherently violent and class-riven nature of human sociality. (p. 11) ⁷

Alternative interpretations exist which are less encumbered by Kojève’s version of Hegel. These take the concepts of mastery and slavery less literally, but they still tend to assume that recognition and misrecognition are concepts and practices that apply in the real, public, social world (Agné et al., 2013; Duncombe, 2016; Epstein et al., 2018; Kymlicka, 1995; Ringmar, 2002; Taylor, 1994; Zarakol, 2018).

By contrast, this article aims to situate the master–servant dialectic in the context of the overall narrative arc of the book in which it appears. In doing so, it deepens and further substantiates Hutchings’ (2003) insight that recognition theory is fundamentally about an ‘abstract inter-individual relationship’ (p. 47), which occurs before the existence of a broader social world has been established (see also Pinkard, 1994: 55). Recognition and misrecognition occur before the social world rather than in a social world. An over-emphasis on an isolated version of recognition theory means that later parts of the Phenomenology – those that do occur in a full-fledged social world – end up being under-explored and under-utilised, when thinking about what the book’s arguments could mean for contemporary international practices such as human rights.

The Phenomenology is fundamentally a metaphor for what goes on inside of, and can be known through, a human mind’s own self-reflection about its relationship to the world (Hammer, 2007: 118; Pippin, 2001: 3). This metaphor is built for a specific purpose: responding to Cartesian scepticism (Hammer, 2007: 120). In his famous contribution to epistemology and metaphysics, Descartes (1993) starts off by doubting everything that he thinks he knows. He tries to find a thought that is certain amid this doubt, and he ends up with one secure foundation: the fact that he thinks. If he can have thoughts, this necessarily implies the existence of a mind – a person – that is having these thoughts. However, much of the rest of what he thinks he knows (e.g. arithmetical and geometrical facts, and information gained through the senses) could all be an elaborate deception: things that appear to be true or real, but which do not correspond to a reality outside of the mind. Descartes ultimately struggles to ground knowledge of most of what he thinks is true and real, because his main attempt to do so rests upon logically spurious reasoning aiming to prove the existence of a God who would not deceive him. Hegel’s starting point is identical. He aims to show what knowledge can be built up by thinking about truth and reality by starting from the perspective of a single thinking mind (Hegel, 2018: 60–101). However, he takes a radically different second step from Descartes, setting him off on an entirely different direction. For Hegel (2018: 74), the existence of a mind that thinks necessarily implies a world in which that mind exists and against which it differentiates itself. The rest of what follows in book builds up much more knowledge of reality than Descartes was able to, all from the perspective of this thinking mind, this thinking ‘I’, who exists in a dynamic relationship with the world.

Once the thinking ‘I’ is confident in the existence of the mind and the world, it then considers the possibility of other similarly self-conscious people. Does one even know that they exist, and if so, that they are just as self-conscious as oneself? To respond to this, Hegel uses a tactic similar to the one he used to establish the simultaneous existence of the mind and the world. The existence of the self, as a distinct self, relies on the existence of another against which the self can be differentiated. In a rare example of clear prose, Hegel (2018) says, ‘It is in confronting an other that the I is itself’ (p. 102). If both the self and the other are self-conscious, and if self-conscious beings can recognise self-consciousness in another, then each could confirm that the other is real (Hegel, 2018: 107). They can ‘recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other’ (Hegel, 2018: 110). The problem of other minds thereby becomes intertwined with establishing secure knowledge of the self (Bernstein, 2007: 183–184).

The master–servant dialectic is best interpreted in light of the role that it plays in advancing this project. Until this point, the Phenomenology’s protagonist risks being caught in a vicious circle. He has no certain knowledge of himself or of other minds, but only another mind could contribute to providing that certain knowledge. The figures of the master and the servant are introduced as the way out of this circle. The book’s protagonist (a thinking mind in the world) needs to take two perspectives at once. He needs to see himself and others from his own perspective (the internal perspective), and simultaneously, he needs to try to see himself as the other sees him (the external perspective). From the internal perspective, the protagonist starts off as certain about his own self-consciousness as Descartes was. However, he is unsure how to demonstrate the equal self-consciousness of others. As a result, he remains mired in the same scepticism that Cartesian thinking leads to, and this ultimately erodes the basis on which his own self-knowledge can remain secure. This is the figure of the ‘master’. If the protagonist tries to take the other’s point of view, he sees someone else that looks and acts self-conscious; he sees himself from the external perspective (compare Aalberts, 2018: 875; Ringmar, 2002: 118; Wendt, 1999: 173). However, this is viewed from the perspective of someone who starts off unsure about – rather than secure in – their own self-knowledge. This is the figure of the ‘servant’ (Hegel, 2018: 113–124). The idea that both the master and the servant are perspectives or ‘representations’ (Neuhouser, 1986: 257) that exist within one’s own self is Hegel’s way out of the vicious circle. As the self and the other are each capable of taking both their own and the other’s perspective at the same time, this allows for the possibility of mutual recognition. This allows the book’s narrative to move past the ‘abstract inter-individual’ encounter (Hutchings, 2003: 47) – from the perspective of a single consciousness’ self-reflection (Hammer, 2007: 113) – and past this towards a consideration of the public and collective world of action.

Situating the master–servant dialectic within the overall narrative arc of the book suggests that this dialectic is intended as metaphorical rather than historical, and as strongly idealist rather than materialist in its ontology. It is an early step, taken before the emergence of any form of public or social life, on a path that ultimately leads to knowledge of a richer and more concrete reality: one in which the self is intertwined with a full-fledged social world. This early step of Hegel’s work is of great interest on its own terms. However, once one understands its intended function in a wider (and ambitious) argument about the foundations of epistemology and metaphysics, it seems less relevant for political analysis – or differently relevant – than the language of ‘master’, ‘servant’ and ‘struggle’ initially suggests. The payoff of this analysis will become clear later in the article, when I discuss the complementarity of the internal and external perspectives from which the ethics of action can be evaluated. The main applications of recognition theory to humanitarianism and human rights treat recognition as something that happens in real historical or contemporary social situations. However, looking at the purpose and function of recognition theory suggests that the most fruitful parts of the Phenomenology for analysing and evaluating social and political practices are likely to come later in the book.

A critique of Hegel on Antigone: obligations and social reality

In this section, the article moves beyond the theory of recognition and considers the later parts of the Phenomenology: those which move past the abstract, asocial encounter between two self-conscious beings, and which engage explicitly with questions of action and ethics in a context of ‘collective or social existence’ (Hutchings, 2003: 57). It does this especially through an analysis of Hegel’s (2018: 256–267) discussion of Sophocles’ (1982) play Antigone, which appears in the Phenomenology’s chapter on ‘Spirit’. ⁸ This section of the article first briefly summarises Antigone’s key relevant plot points, for the purpose of rendering the rest of the argument intelligible. Second, it explains how Hegel aims to mobilise an analysis of this classical text to build an ontology of the relationship between self-conscious moral agents and their social world. It is here, not in the earlier discussion of recognition, that Hegel locates debates about ethics and politics. Third, the section pivots back to the play itself, to highlight flaws in Hegel’s interpretation. These flaws stem at least in part from his theory of history that casts the European constitutional states of his time as a superior mode of socio-political organisation. This analysis ultimately allows the article to re-theorise the relationship between agents and practices in a post-Hegelian way, which will be applied in the next section to contemporary practices of human rights and state sovereignty.

Sophocles’ (1982) Antigone, written in the middle of the 5th-century BC, is set in the ancient Greek city of Thebes. It revolves around two protagonists: Antigone and Creon. The story begins with a discussion between Antigone and her sister Ismene. They are grieving the recent death of their two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, who had killed each other in battle on opposite sides of a war. Eteocles had successfully defended Thebes against a foreign insurrection led by Polynices. This left the brothers’ and Antigone’s uncle Creon as the city’s sole ruler. The play’s action kicks off when Antigone tells Ismene that Creon has just laid down a law forbidding – on penalty of death – the burial of the traitor Polynices: meaning his body would be left to rot, for the birds and dogs to pick at, outside of the city gates. Antigone asks Ismene to join her in defying this law, which Ismene declines to do. Ismene believes that risking their own deaths – as the only two survivors in a family already marred by a series of tragic deaths (the family of Oedipus) – would be ‘madness’; she decides to ‘beg the dead to forgive [her]’ (Sophocles, 1982: 62) instead of defying the law. The scene then shifts to Creon, who makes the expected public proclamation forbidding Polynices’ burial, and explains the reasons behind it. Drawing from a logic that will be familiar to fans of Walzer’s (1977, 1983) political theory, or to believers in the view that survival will always trump other values (Mearsheimer, 2001), he says the city is the very thing that makes the safety and pursuit of the good of all its residents possible. Polynices’ leadership of a foreign armed insurrection is therefore not an ordinary crime, but an existential danger that must be dealt with accordingly. Creon barely finishes warning the public against disobedience before a sentry walks in, reporting that Polynices’ body has had dust sprinkled on it as a symbolic burial ritual. Creon, furious, issues an order for the offender to be found and captured.

After a short time, the sentry comes back with Antigone in tow. She freely admits to having performed the symbolic burial, saying she ‘could not allow [her] own mother’s son to rot’ (Sophocles, 1982: 82) and that Creon’s ‘mere mortal’ edict had no force compared with the long-standing religious traditions associated with a family member’s death. Ismene, who returns to the action after Creon falsely accuses her of complicity, reminds Creon that Antigone is engaged to marry Creon’s son Haemon; killing Antigone would rob his son of his bride. Creon is unmoved by this argument. Haemon himself then comes in. He has heard whispers on the streets that many citizens are sympathetic to Antigone’s unwillingness to leave her brother lying unburied in a pool of his own blood, to be ripped apart by dogs and vultures. Haemon councils his father that the citizens may start to see Creon as an unyielding tyrant, rather than as a wise and just ruler, if he goes through with his plan to execute her. The prudent course of action, from the perspective of preserving civic harmony, would therefore be for Creon to reverse his edict. Upon hearing this, Creon becomes even more furious. He accuses his son of treason for appearing to take Antigone’s side. He says that obedience to the king and his law is indistinguishable from the city and its interests. Creon decides that Antigone should be taken to a wild, remote place, and walled up alive with only a small amount of food. The Chorus, representing the city’s elders – who up until then had seen only Antigone’s mind-set as too unbending and extreme – now starts to see real red flags in Creon’s behaviour too. Antigone, for her part, is equally inflexible. She gets marched away by the palace guards while expressing (through a layer of irony that some readers may miss) her certainty that her actions are in line with the gods’ will, saying that she and her brothers are ‘the last in a great line of kings’, and chastising the inferior ‘breed of men’ who condemn her as a criminal (Sophocles, 1982: 106–107).

The play ends when Creon changes his mind – too late – after receiving warnings from a visionary. The visionary says that as Creon has ‘robbed the gods below the earth’ of Polynices, he will need to surrender one of his own children to those same gods: ‘a corpse for corpses given in return’ (Sophocles, 1982: 115). This spooks Creon completely. He buries Polynices, then goes to tear down the wall that had sealed off Antigone. Haemon arrives before him, only to discover that Antigone has already hanged herself. When Creon gets there, Haemon, wild with grief, tries to kill his father with a sword. But he misses. Haemon then throws himself onto his own sword, dying while embracing Antigone’s dead – and now also bloody – body. Creon’s wife Eurydice also kills herself upon hearing the news.

The ‘Spirit’ chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology uses this plot as a backdrop to situate the book’s protagonist (the self-conscious, thinking mind) in an actual social and historical situation for the first time. Hegel (2018) explores how collective practices and values become ‘actual in the self’ (p. 268). The Phenomenology’s protagonist is now in actual social reality. He can see that there are two different deep sources of obligation: the family (or household) and the polis. In the abstract, according to Hegel, these sources of obligation appear to exist in perfect harmony. The family generates, cares for and raises the citizens and leaders that go out into the polis. The state, in turn, then protects and provides a context in which families can thrive and perpetuate themselves into the future. However, this harmony is static, existing only at an abstract or theoretical level. It becomes disrupted the moment a character in the real world acts on her obligation in a concrete way. On Hegel’s interpretation, Antigone embodies the family, the ethical source of which is ‘divine law’, and Creon embodies the polis, the ethical source of which is ‘human law’. ⁹ The moment that the two brothers kill each other, Antigone’s obligation and Creon’s obligation become fundamentally opposed and incompatible (Hegel, 2018: 269). It is important to emphasise that the tragedy does not arise because there are two competing demands on the same person. It is significant that Antigone and Creon are two different people, each of whom acts almost mechanistically (on Hegel’s interpretation) as embodiments of their respective sources of obligation.

The harmony of the two deep sources of obligation in the abstract, combined with their unyielding opposition in a specific context and moment, ends up destroying both spheres so completely as transcendent sources of value that it becomes a ‘big bang’ type event that launches the possibility of ethical individualism in its wake. Individuals first see themselves as imperial gods, believing that they can invent their own sources of value (Hegel, 2018: 280). The inadequacy (and destructiveness in its own way) of this radically individualist moral ontology eventually moves things forward historically to a point where the same self may have multiple points of ethical reference. These points of reference are independently valid (despite being plural), because they each take the form of ‘pure duty’ at the most abstract level (Hegel, 2018: 352). Yet they are not fully determinate of action because agents need to ‘choose and decide among them’ (Hegel, 2018: 372–374). The protagonist’s ability to realise that all of these seemingly very grand sources of ethical practice can be embodied within a single self – combined with the blurring of the boundaries between the individual self and the collective self – is Hegel’s ultimate rebuke to Descartes. Knowledge of oneself is the same as knowledge of the social world.

This is a powerful ontological basis for social and political theory. It enables contemporary human rights to be theorised in an analogous way to the family/household and the polis: a distinct and logically independent source of obligation, which co-exists with others, and within which agency is embedded. However, Hegel’s analysis also contains flaws. I now turn to a more critical exploration of how Hegel has misinterpreted Antigone, and I subsequently shall use these critiques to help build a post-Hegelian understanding of the relationship between moral agents and ethical practices. First, the two main characters (Antigone and Creon) take the supposed separation and incommensurability of binary fields – the family and the polis, divine and human law, the private and the public – very seriously. Hegel is far too drawn in by the characters’ own logics, instead of taking the audience’s point of view (see also Markell, 2003: 74). It is true that Antigone constantly deflects Creon’s political objections to her act back to her obligations of kinship, and Creon refuses to engage with a logic of how his acts may affect his own family until it is too late. Notwithstanding this, or perhaps even because of it, the audience cannot help but leave the theatre thinking that the two practices intersect, to a much greater extent than either Antigone or Creon believes (Hutchings, 2003: 96). This is because while there may be two distinct sources of obligation, there is only one world of action. Antigone ends up bringing her family-based obligation into the political domain, by first admitting to her act instead of keeping it secret, and second through her public speeches; conversely, Creon ends up acting in the family sphere, by de-prioritising his son’s marriage, and by extension, the continuation of his own bloodline (Dietz, 1985; Markell, 2003: 80–84; Mills, 1996a). At one point, the Chorus, reflecting the perspective of the play’s audience, explicitly equates the virtues necessary for being a good political leader with the virtues needed for good household management (Sophocles, 1982: 94).

However, despite this bleeding into one another of each field in the world of action, are the ethical obligations themselves to which each practice gives rise nevertheless incommensurable? Hegel’s answer, explored above, is clearly ‘yes’. He thinks that Antigone and Creon cannot both fulfil their obligations. This has influenced an important literature on ‘tragic choices’ in international political theory, which analyses situations where there is no right answer to a moral question, because a moral agent will fail to meet at least one set of obligations no matter what he or she does (Brown, 2007; Erskine and Lebow, 2012a: 10–12; Frost, 2003). Significantly, however, Sophocles’ answer to the same question is arguably ‘no’. One of the play’s central features is how Ismene acts as a foil for Antigone, and Haemon acts as a foil for Creon. First, Ismene, more so than Antigone, captures what family obligation really requires in the context of the play’s action (Dietz, 1985). She recognises that the living sisters’ obligations to stay alive for each other are equally if not more important than their obligations to the dead. Her kinship obligation requires her to beg the gods to forgive her brother (and to beg the dead for forgiveness for herself), within the bounds of making sure that she herself stays alive too. In light of this alternative, which is explicitly voiced early in the play, Antigone can be viewed as representing a warped or disfigured version of what family obligation and religious piety require, rather than as the real thing (Butler, 2000). Second, Haemon provides an even more explicit example of the same dynamic in relation to Creon. In giving council to his father after hearing the reaction of the citizens of Thebes, he says that the stability of the polis requires leaders who show moderation. It requires leaders who are willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence and arguments. It requires leaders who put their people above their own authority to rule. And as far as the audience is concerned – especially in a classical Greek direct democracy – Haemon is right. Just as Antigone is explicitly presented with (and rejects) a logic of how her obligations of kinship could be made compatible with her obligations to the political community, Creon is also presented with (and rejects) a logic of how his obligations of state could be made compatible with his obligations to his family.

Far from being either a story of two equal yet opposite ethical actors (Hegel’s interpretation) or a story of a hero and a villain (a tempting contemporary interpretation), Antigone is fundamentally about how two main characters each succumbs to hubris: overweening pride that leads to their downfall and the downfall of those around them (see also Lu, 2012: 167). Antigone and Creon are both so convinced that they are right, so convinced that they have no choice, that they both forget that they do have choices. This is exactly the function served by Ismene and Haemon as foils. The nature of Creon’s hubris is obvious in his character’s arc. Antigone’s hubris is more subtle from a contemporary perspective, but it would have been obvious to a classical Greek audience. She treats herself as the earthly arbiter of the gods’ will; as better than her follow citizens because of her pedigree; as someone who is certain that she knows what divine law requires. Instead of allowing the gods to express their will through the visionary, who successfully persuades Creon to allow the burial (leading to a plausible, alternative dramatic ending, in which the gods have saved the day), Antigone intervenes and takes her fate into her own hands. This act, a self-righteous rather than pious one, seals the play’s status as a tragedy. What Hegel therefore gets wrong is his view that these conflicts of obligation were irresolvable from within the ‘primitive’ framework of Ancient Greece. He aims to draw a contrast between the past and the present, to highlight the European socio-political organisation of his time as further advanced within history: as a context within which deep conflicts of obligation could uniquely be resolved in a non-subjectivist way by (emergent) modern liberal subjects. A post-Hegelian approach can find much to value in Hegel’s early social ontology of ‘ethical life’, while also leaving his theory of historical progress towards European constitutional statehood aside: thereby seeing the possibility of value-pluralist ethics in different political contexts, and at different scales, separately from their instantiation in the ‘society of states’ (compare Lechner and Frost, 2018: 127–153). ¹⁰

There are two insights to draw from this analysis from which one can begin to construct a post-Hegelian theory of human rights. The first key insight is that there are multiple practices within which action may be simultaneously embedded. This multiplicity need not lead either to an irreconcilable clash of obligations or to the need to subsume one set of values underneath another. Instead, these multiple practices, which may seem to generate clashing obligations in the abstract, can be reconciled once agents need to make specific ethical choices within them, thereby contributing to the practices’ construction and re-construction. The second key insight is about hubris. Moral agents can only ever be imperfect interpreters of their own obligations. There will always be an important and productive tension between the right thing to do as interpreted from within a particular practice – whether it is human rights or any other international practice – and the question that arises from an external perspective (the audience’s perspective) of how well one has interpreted and understood one’s own obligations. Members of the audience are familiar with the ethical practices that Antigone and Creon take as their sources of action. They are even ‘insiders’ of these practices once they step out of the theatre. But while watching the play, while seeing its specific action and events unfold in context, they can observe – and eventually discuss and debate – both whether Antigone and Creon have correctly interpreted their own practices and also whether each character has done the right thing, all things considered.

Human rights beyond the state: the co-constitution of agents and practices

I shall now apply the social ontology developed in the previous section to build a post-Hegelian theory of human rights. This can be usefully contrasted with three mainstream ways that the social reality of contemporary human rights is understood. ¹¹ First, human rights might be understood as an abstract set of entitlements, based on notions such as human dignity, autonomy, need or capability, which all humans ought to be able to access to simply because they are human (Gewirth, 1978; Griffin, 2008; Nussbaum, 2000; Shue, 1996). States are typically conceived as the primary bearers of duties in connection with these entitlements (Tasioulas, 2010). On this view, the reality of human rights is reducible to the success of rational argument demonstrating the necessity or universal desirability of things such as life, security, health, education, free association and non-discrimination, for all people (Meckled-Garcia and Çali, 2006). Second, human rights can be understood in a more legalistic sense as a set of regulative rules – which can in principle be legalised or constitutionalised – governing how everyone inside of a sovereign space must be treated as individuals. This approach treats states, or political communities bounded by states, as constitutive of ethical and social action; and treats human rights as regulative rules and norms that are enabled by and embedded within this sphere. Third, human rights can be understood as a set of contemporary constitutive rules that sovereigns must accept for their continued status as sovereign to be recognised. This idea, which is behind contemporary discussions of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ policy doctrine, views sovereignty and statehood as constituted by human rights (Deng et al., 1996).

This article’s post-Hegelian theory of human rights is distinctive from these mainstream alternatives. The social ontology developed in the previous section enables human rights to be theorised as an international practice (rather than as an abstract set of values or entitlements), analogous to the family or the polis in Antigone. Human rights provide a contemporary ‘community of belonging’ (Saunders, 2018: 850) in this sense. However, it is a practice in its own right: one that exists separately to and beyond the state, instead of needing to be understood in relation to and in opposition with sovereignty. In the broadest sense, both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right conceive of ‘ethical life’ as a set of practices and authoritative institutions within which agents and agency are embedded. However, these multiple practices and commitments end up becoming circumscribed in Hegel’s later work within the institutions of a single state, and within the relations of those states with one another. ¹² A post-Hegelian theory sees this statism as contingent rather than as inextricably bound to the reality of human rights. It sees sovereignty as one of multiple practices, which are bounded by the self rather than by the state. Human rights, viewed in this way, are a discrete practice that embeds action and obligations within it. Moreover, it brings forms of action and obligation into being: action to humanise each person, and obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights (Beitz, 2009: 109; Karp, 2020; Shue, 1996; Weinert, 2015). It provides an available source of value, while co-existing with other international practices.

Contemporary moral agents are simultaneously embedded within multiple ethical practices, and therefore have multiple sources of value from which they can draw. Practices of citizenship, sovereignty or family, for example, may seem to generate competing obligations as compared to those required by human rights. Taylor (1985b) develops this point using Sartre’s (2007) famous example of a man who needs to choose whether to join the resistance in wartime France to fight for his political community, or whether to stay at home to protect and care for his ill parent. Taylor disputes the seeming intractability of this decision: its seemingly tragic nature. He does so by pointing out how we are constructing both ourselves and our practices through our choices (see also Taylor, 1985a: 208). Decisions of this kind have no clear ‘right’ choice, and no clear easy choice. This is exactly because either choice is defensible according to a strong source of value (Taylor, 1985b). However, this does not mean that one needs to fail at something no matter what one chooses. Instead, at a collective level, both the family and the political community are strong sources of value, from which the self can be constructed. Choices that seem (and sometimes are) tragic at the individual level does not necessarily mean that practices clash, because practices are fields for collective action.

As a contemporary example of multiple yet discrete practices that can be advanced and changed collectively: Madhok (2022) shows how collective claims for ‘haq’ – a concept of ‘right’ or ‘rights’ that exists in several of the languages spoken in ‘most of the world’ – enable changes in the nature and meaning of citizenship. Through her ethnographic work in Rajasthan, where hunger persists and where the human right to food is not fulfilled, she traces how the ‘haq’ concept was deployed by residents to reorder local political institutions and relationships of accountability, outside of a statist frame (Madhok, 2022: 100–143). ¹³ Rajasthanis’ creation of ‘new public monitoring mechanisms which focus on the public shaming of the powerful’ re-imagines the relevant ‘powerful’ actors who are responsible for fulfilling the right to food, beyond sovereign states and their legal obligations (Madhok, 2022: 111). Similarly, Odysseos (2016) writes brilliantly about struggles for justice in Bhopal after a disastrous chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant in 1984. She highlights how the practice of human rights simultaneously does two things at once. First, a neo-liberal conception of human rights has the power to constrain, govern and shape action: responsibilising individuals to provide for themselves, as a fundamental step before placing any burdens on other actors (Odysseos, 2016: 186–188). Second, however, the practice also has a dynamic and generative aspect that makes resistance and new forms of action possible. Human rights practice provides Bhopal survivors with a language and an internationally recognised framework in which to attribute responsibility both to Union Carbide and to the Indian state, and furthermore to call for deeper structural reform (Odysseos, 2016: 191–193). Perhaps most significantly, it offers survivors ‘coherent accounts of themselves as rights-holders of equal moral worth’ (Odysseos, 2016: 192).

This disrupts a mainstream view in political science that human rights are best defined as a measurable set of liberal standards of governance, which only emerged accidentally as a consequence of historical bargaining struggles among social and political elites (Tilly, 1985). It shows the operation of power in a different dimension, and on a different scale, as compared to the hierarchical relationship between two actors envisioned by the master–servant dialectic. Instead of calling for recognition by another, more powerful actor (as a historical precursor to rights), an equal status is something that can be claimed for oneself, by drawing on the structural power of the practice (Phillips, 2015). Lukes (2021) calls this structural focus a ‘three-dimensional view’ of power. This can be contrasted with the mainstream’s ‘one-dimensional’ (Lukes, 2021: 21–24) view about human rights’ power: that they only work or become real when a plurality of other elite actors can get a state to do something that it would not otherwise do (Snyder, 2022). A post-Hegelian theory can thereby theorise translocal actors, including those based outside of Europe or North America, as equal participants for the ongoing theorisation and construction of human rights as a practice. It furthermore provides another illustration of the logical separation of human rights from sovereignty and statehood.

These examples from human rights practice can be refracted back through the previous section’s analysis of Antigone. Like contemporary human rights, the family and the polis are dynamic (rather than static) practices, which interact despite being separate and which change over time. They exist as discrete patterns of action and obligation on a transnational scale, while having specific local instantiations within which variation and contestation can occur. The downfall of both Antigone and Creon was caused by the mechanistic way in which each character understood the relationship between an ethical practice and an individuated obligation. Both characters repeatedly express that they have no choice. However, Sophocles uses dialogue with Ismene, Haemon and the chorus to show the audience that both characters do have choices, and alternative interpretations of ethical action, that each fails to see. No matter how shattered the protagonists’ polis and families seem to be by the end of play’s action, the audience never doubts that these structures will persist – perhaps in a transformed way – after the play comes to an end. By analogy, instead of being bound to static existing definitions of ‘human rights’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘sovereignty’, agents’ collective reflection and action within these practices can allow for the possibility of change. This better enables a theorisation of how responsibilities – such as those to respect, protect and fulfil – are generated by human rights practice as fields for collective action rather than only for individual and state duty (Karp, 2020). Whereas many lawyers and philosophers see human rights obligations as static (once established), a post-Hegelian theory emphasises their dynamic nature, due to their co-constitutive relationship with agents and agency.

This brings the article to its last key point, about the relationship between practices and responsibility. Frost (2002: 77) suggests that conversations about the correct interpretation of our obligations are only possible by taking a point of view internal to the practice within they are embedded. In a similar vein, Alznauer’s (2008) discussion of responsibility from a Hegelian perspective emphasises the internal point of view, while contrasting it with an external or third-party perspective from which action could also be evaluated. However, Antigone serves as a warning to anyone who would take an internal perspective too far. Both Antigone and Creon (until the end) are certain they are right, because they have the weight and force of their practice behind them. Like Antigone, many of the practitioners of human rights are vested with certainty that they are right in what they do (Mutua, 2001). Hopgood (2009), for example, has charted Amnesty International’s fraught relationship with the religious or transcendental sources of authority that they claim for themselves, as earthly arbiters of what a human-rights-based ethic requires. This looks very much like hubris, and the results can be catastrophic when this hubris-based sense of perfect obligation is coupled with power (Kennedy, 2003). This serves as a warning, and as a call for humility, for both elite NGOs and powerful states: all those who invoke human rights to say that ‘there is no other choice’. However, a rejection of too much self-certainty, stemming from a perceived connection to the transcendental, should not lead to paralysis and inaction for human rights practitioners. In between hubris and inaction, there is scope for judgement. This invocation of a transcendental realm can be brought down to earth within a post-Hegelian social ontology as the broader, intersubjective social world: a world and a self that provide an embedded standpoint from which to evaluate action and practices.

Hegelian and post-Hegelian thinking is bound to reject abstract rationalism, such as the categorical imperative or utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits, as a sound external basis on which action and obligation can be evaluated (see Hutchings, 2018: 50–51). However, this does not need to involve a wholesale rejection of an external or third-party point of view. Think of this article’s earlier exploration of how internal and external perspectives complement one another to resolve dilemmas of recognition. This is a significant and useful aspect of Hegel’s thought: one that is worth endorsing, even while moving past other aspects of his theory. Similarly, think of the role of the audience in Sophocles’ play. This is an external – but still embedded and context-rich – perspective from which it is possible to discuss and to judge whether Antigone and Creon are truly obligated to do what they do. This is clearly applicable to contemporary global ethics. Regardless of the evaluative stance that any one person takes towards human rights practice, it exists today as a significant and widely diffused source of value. We can all watch and understand the meaning of action taken in the name of human rights, irrespective of whether life – or our own ethical choices – makes us a protagonist within that action at any one moment in time. This dual insider/outsider ‘audience’ perspective enables practices themselves, as well as action within them, to be collectively discussed and evaluated (see also Pippin, 2007: 165–167). It critically and socially re-situates, at a translocal scale, the role-independent reflective standpoint that Kant (1996) had attributed solely to isolated individuals: while also showing how that perspective remains practice-based despite being external (see also Nagel, 1986). This non-rationalist bridging of internal and external perspectives is a stronger starting point from which to discuss the ethics of action within human-rights practice than an exclusively internal point of view. Sovereign statehood and human rights are not inextricably tied to each other, either in a constitutive or a regulative relationship. Instead, both practices are available for agents to draw from, alongside others, as they take situated overall decisions about the right thing to do.

Conclusion

This article explored the significance of recognition theory and statism within global ethics, but also moved beyond these ideas to develop a post-Hegelian theory of human rights. The most central part of the Phenomenology of Spirit for this purpose is not the dialectic of the master and the servant. Instead, it is the use of Sophocles’ play Antigone to build a theory how action and agency are embedded within ethical practices. This is a different social ontology for human rights as compared to abstract rationalism: according to which the reality of human rights consists in deontological or consequentialist arguments that can be made about them. Too often, it has been assumed that states and their legal and political institutions must form the concrete context within which human rights are embedded. However, the embeddedness of rights needs not imply that they are embedded within (or in relation to) states. Instead, sovereignty and human rights co-exist, in a social world that contains a broader multiplicity of ethical practices. Human rights, understood in this way, make certain forms of action and agency possible. Discrete practices are not enmeshed with each other in a relationship of tragic conflict. Instead, each is enmeshed with the social world, and therefore with the people whose selves, agency and choices exist in a dynamic relationship with that world. International practices do not necessarily exist in a relationship of hierarchy. A human rights practitioner’s certainty that an action is right (in a specific context), from a perspective internal to the practice, might be hubris rather than the best conclusion about how to act. However, self-righteous, self-certain, fully internal justifications for ignoring human rights in the name of other values or practices – such as political community, security, religion or family – can and should be challenged in a similar way. This overarching social world, and the self that is entangled with it, provides an external standpoint (the audience’s point of view) from which the ethics of action can be meaningfully evaluated, all things considered, once the action guidance from multiple practices is considered and collectively weighed up.

Beyond this core argument, this article contributed to knowledge in politics and IR by engaging with the classical text of Antigone in a way that goes much deeper than the typical (in our discipline) one-paragraph summary of the main plot. Many readers of this journal will be aware of the play’s status as one of the first artistic works on record to engage extensively with the question of obligations to the state. However, we do not necessarily know the play and its lessons as well as we think we do. This article can provide a new reference point for further thinking in this vein.