ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses various critiques of human rights. Stress is laid on criticism by Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Ratna Kapur, Upendra Baxi, Gayatri Spivak, Richard Rorty and Micheal Ignatieff, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. These critiques are classified under different labels such as modern critiques, contemporary critiques, postcolonial critiques, liberal critiques and post-Althusserian critiques. It is concluded that the stakes of these critiques varied considerably depending on the historical context and on the politico-philosophical stance of their authors.
