Human Rights, Legal Democracy, and Populism

The chapter will fi rst discuss the— in many ways extraordinary— rise of human rights, in particular from the 1970s onwards, briefl y discussing the (international) institutionalisation of human rights as well as the diffusion of a universal human rights language among a range of political, legal, and social actors, including judicial and political elites, social movements, and NGOs, as well as dissidents and intellectuals. In the second part of the chapter, the focus is on how the human rights language has also become a main point of attention in critical social and political thinking, perhaps most evidently so in France.