ABSTRACT
How can human rights be other than rhetoric? For example, Alan Norrie reads Adorno as having a positive side which comes rather close to Douzinas’ thesis of the ‘end’ of human rights with which I engage in Chapter 8. For Norrie, Adorno also speaks of:
. . . a social and historical evolution of the quality of being human. Such a vision of the human condition, latent and unfulfilled, speaks through the limits of the existing forms in which freedom is expressed. What lies underneath those forms and is signalled by their presence is the promise of a real autonomy. This presses at the limits of what is expressed or understood as actually existing autonomy, as something inchoate within the present: something already there, but also still ‘to come’.1
