Bøger af Mogens Chrom Jacobsen

This volume unites four papers about Michel Foucault or inspired by him. I came to Foucault a bit by accident being entrusted with the translation into Danish of a large number of his published works. This has been a fascinating task and I have learned much from working with his texts, but I am not quite sure that Foucault would have valued as highly as me much of what I appreciate in his works. This is also the reason why some of these papers are quite critical of Foucault even though they are also based on some essential insights of his. The first paper, Foucauldian Features in the History of Human Rights, has never been published before. It was produced for the International Conference "Michel Foucault and the Problems of Contemporary Society," Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, Russia. The second paper, Foucault, Relativism, and Political Action, was published in Ingerid S. Straume and J. F. Humphrey (eds.), Depoliticization, The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism, Malmö NSU-Press: 209-228. This paper was presented for the winter session of the Nordic Summer University, Oslo, Norway, in 2004. It is also available at https: //www.academia.edu/336404/ DEPOLITICIZATION_The_Political_Imaginary_of_Global_Capitalism The third paper, Utilitarianism and the Devices of Power, has been published in Swedish as Utilitarismen och maktens verktyg. Res publica. No. 64. 2004: 32-51. I am here publishing the English original which were translated into Swedish. This paper was presented for the summer session of the Nordic Summer University, Hämeenlinna, Finland, in 2002. The last paper, Reason and Unreason, Or Michel Foucault as Historian of Ideas, has never been published before. This paper was presented for the summer session of the Nordic Summer University, Brandbjerg, Denmark, in 2012.

This study argues that we cannot reasonably keep on speaking as though there is only one conception of human rights. The consensus around certain core rights, though important, hides the fact that very different moral sensibilities are at work. The American and French declarations from the 18th century originate in a very different moral sensibility than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. Their conceptions of humanity and its moral destiny are totally different. The former emphasize liberty while the latter emphasize human flourishing. The former enforces basic rules of mutual respect and leaves the rest to the individual's own choice, while the latter conceives human life as basically moral prescribing an ideal of human perfection. A third and very common ceonception today conceives human rights as a basic standard of human decency, which does not exclude other moral considerations. A basic regime of human rights leaves room for local choises in favour of liberty, human flourishing or something else, but no particular declaration seems to correspond to the view. This third view seems to be of a recent date and its theoretical foundation is such that it cannot claim any of the other declarations as its ancestors though it might be a "mutation" or misunderstanding of the classical 18th century declarations. A major part of this study traces the origin of the conception of rights behind the classical declarations, notably the Virginia declaration of 1776 and the French declaration of 1789. This conception will be contrasted with a perfectionist conception of morality, which only furnished itself with a conception of human rights very late. The third conception will be examined in the last chapter.