This article deals with Michel Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 courses on liberalism and neoliberalism. It aspires to elucidate the historical circumstances, the conception of liberalism as critical political rationality and its projections in Foucault’s subsequent research. Along the same lines, the article also makes some critical considerations about the reception of Foucault’s ideas about liberal and neoliberal thought.

This article aims to realize a rational reconstruction of the use of the proportionality analy-sis in order to adjudicate social rights. It supports the thesis that a social right is violated when the omission of one several factual positive actions, which limits it, is dispropor-tionate in a broadly sense, i.e., that either it lacks suitability or unnecessary or it is dispro-portionate in a narrow sense.

In this work I criticize the traditional version of the concept of “human rights”. This view relies on the State-centric thesis which sustains that what makes this concept special is that only states are bound by human rights obligations, and that only states can violate them. I defend an alternative account based on the interest theory of rights put forward by Raz, together with the successive waves of duties theory of Jeremy Waldron. Grounded on these views I develop a critical (...) reading of the present situation –socially, politically and economically– in order to propose a complete theory of human rights which claims that there are other non-state actors who have obligations of human rights properly, and that they can effectively violate human rights. (shrink)

International interventions have traditionally been justified on the basis of human rights violations, insofar as these strike us as intolerably unjust. In this paper I will argue that there are compelling reasons for the international community to consider political legitimacy as an additional value to be protected. I offer three independent arguments in favour of my claim. The first two arguments dwell on the relationship between democracy and human rights. The third aims to show that political legitimacy has logical and (...) normative priority over justice. From this priority it follows that international interventions should be made with the aim of ensuring political legitimacy. (shrink)

The dualism man-citizen represents one of the founding features of liberalism. From the perspective of Gerald A. Cohen, this division embodies the fundamental disagreement between socialism and John Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism. Thus, adopting Cohen’s viewpoint, I first look into some general traits of this case and then go on to point out how it has an impact on the responsibility for preferences. Secondly, taking into account the two parts of the basic structure, I analyze how the first principle of justice (...) –as a constitutional essential– is linked to citizens as a “collective body”, whereas the second principle –lacking force of law– is taken upon by particular individuals and associations. Lastly, in view of the tensions between the motives of citizens and individuals, I hold that the social minimum prescribed by Rawls might be insufficient to secure the fair equality of political liberties, fraternity, and self-respect, given the inequalities allowed by the difference principle. (shrink)

When should binding debt contracts not be repaid? This article argues that whenever the repayment of sovereign debt threatens the human rights of the citizenry, this provides a weighty normative reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the latter over the former. Since there are specific, non-coincidental reasons to fear that a high indebtedness of states may result in the undermining of the socio-economic and the collective human rights of a state’s citizenry, the more specific thesis defended in this article is (...) the following: whenever debt repayment undermines the socio-economic and collective human rights of the state´s citizenry, states have a normatively weighty reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the citizen’s human rights over meeting their contractual debt payment obligations vis-à-vis their creditors. (shrink)