BIOPOLITIKA I IDEOLOGIJA LJUDSKIH PRAVA
BIOPOLITICS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the philosophical foundations of the ideology of inalienable human rights and its structural limitations through the dialectic of social contract theory and biopolitical analysis. Beginning with Aristotle›s conception of the state as a community oriented toward the good life, the paper traces the transformation of that ideal within the liberal tradition of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who ground the political order in a rational compact among individuals aimed at the protection of life, liberty, and property. Tugendhat›s critique reveals that the classical models of the social contract rest on a tacit assumption of symmetric contracting parties, thereby structurally excluding those who possess neither the capacity nor the material preconditions for equal participation. This selectivity of the liberal project did not remain a merely theoretical abstraction — it manifested as historical reality in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, when stateless persons and minorities, stripped of citizenship, were left without any institutional protection of their ostensibly inalienable rights. Drawing on the analyses of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault, the paper argues that the modern Nation-State, from its very inception, grounds sovereignty in bare life while retaining the power to exclude that same bare life from legal protection through the act of denationalization. The concentration camp is examined as the ultimate instantiation of this logic — a space in which the state of exception becomes a permanent arrangement and the human being, reduced to a purely biological dimension, acquires the status of homo sacer: a life that anyone may kill without committing a crime. The figure of the Muselmann, as the threshold between the human and the non-human, is interpreted as an ethical test case for any moral system that lays claim to universality. The paper concludes that the ideology of inalienable human rights is not merely a historically superseded fiction, but a living structural tension inherent to any order that constructs sovereignty upon the power to include or exclude a given life from the sphere of protection.

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