FAMILY AS A CATEGORY OF COLLECTIVE POLITICAL RIGHTS

Aleksandar Fatić

Aleksandra Bulatović

Abstract

Issues of human rights are prevalently discussed as pertaining to individual rights as opposed to collective interests. Following the long liberal political tradition, human rights tend to be seen as potentially in opposition to collective rights, which may limit the liberty of the individual to make choices that would militate against the relevant collective interests. In this paper, we argue that individual rights ought to be seen as derivative, social rights. Just as an individual’s identity is markedly determined by the nature and identity of the community one belongs to (Agamben’s concept of ‘Socialitas’ or sociality), individual rights have little meaning outside the context of values, rights and entitlements of one’s community. This is a context that gives rise to the concept of national interest. By definition, national interests are associated with collective rights, entitlements and visions; they are never associated with the views and positions of a single, discrete individual. One of the key collective rights that constitutes national interest is the set of rights of the family. We argue that protecting the family and family rights casts a shadow on the very morality and political legitimacy of the various ideologies of today, including that of feminism, which suggest that, rather than protecting family rights and interests as a primary national policy the state should protect individuals from the family. The ideologies which portray the family as toxic, as a source of threat to individual well-being, are in fact antisocial, totalitarian ideologies, as most of the arguments levied by such ideologies against the family can bear with equal force against Socialitas of any type, against sociality. We argue that Agamben’s ‘moral imperative’ for any individual to contribute, by whatever means one has at one’s disposal, to one’s sociality, applies to our understanding of the family and ought to be taken as a foundation of anti-totalitarian thinking.

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