Republicanism and Human Rights

Resumen

This article discusses the definition of and relationship between two political views of the state: the rule of law of the liberal political tradition, which had its origins in the realm of the political philosophy of modern legal naturalism, and the Hegelian view of the state, which influenced the right-wing and left-wing alternatives to the liberal state in the 19th and 20th centuries. Freedom and equality, political democracy and social democracy, liberalism and socialism are the central thematic poles of this debate. After the end of Nazism after World War II and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the state of law appears as the hegemonic and dominant political theory in the present. However, the reemergence of the debate between libertarians and communitarians, mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, shows that the issues of the previous debate have not been solved yet and that they reappear, although in different contexts and with different meanings, in their whole complexity and dramatic character. This article attempts to define, using the human rights language, some of these crucial issues for contemporary political theory and to make proposals for the construction of a “republican” ethics and politics.

Key words: Liberalism, Socialism, Democracy, Rule of law, Ethical state.