ABSTRACT
Rights were the noblest institutional innovation of modernity, the ‘man’ of rights, the best crystallisation of Enlightenment principles. And yet, endless exclusions have accompanied every statement of right. Rights are both protections used by people against a voracious state or intractable powers and, tools in the modern arsenal for creating and disciplining the subject. Premodern exclusion, based on the inequalities of social hierarchy and divine order, was too obvious, repellent and uneconomical to the modern eye. Similarly, the few rights the absolute rulers of early modernity gave to their subjects were seen as part of royal nature. Right was an attribute of sovereignty and restricted the sovereign only as a revocable grant from the king to his subjects.1 Modern domination is much harder to detect. Freedom and equality are the ostensive foundations of the political system, autonomy and popular sovereignty their institutional applications. At the same time, exclusions, exceptions and separations have been the inescapable companions of freedom and equality. An exploration of this intertwining of freedom and subordination calls for a change of perspective and an abandonment of liberal political philosophy.
