The Republican Tradition and Human Rights (On Lohmann's Critical Reflection on Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx)

Starting from the importance of human rights as a new legitimacy of power of the state in the 18th century, the republican idea of the collective autonomy of the legal community of free citizens will be explained on the ground of Lohmann's twofold critique of a) Kant's intellectualism - the notion of dignity (and the notion of property) signifies a relational (intersubjective) historical notion, not an intrinsic "self-sufficient" entity of a "purpose in itself"; (b) using Lohmann's reconstruction of Marx's ambiguous critique, we will show that if "human rights" mean for Marx the result of human agency, and not of economic determinism, the reference to their "egoistic character" implies a critique of the one-sidedness of their classical Lockean concept, with the need to open up the question of social rights. The study's own thesis is the claim that a "weakly" enforceable norm of "self-esteem" ("the right to have rights") is not enough to justify "membership" in a legal community, but that it is the legal anchoring of "basic needs" ("to have minimum resources to have rights") as normative issue of modern state.