Universalismo, politica, consenso: la lotta per i diritti umani e le sue condizioni epistemiche di possibilità

This essay discusses Edoardo Greblo’s book Cosmopolitismo e diritti umani. Greblo’s text is an interesting contribution to the theory of human rights as instruments to fight oppression, and emphasises its eminently political function. In my commentary essay, starting from a consensus around the idea of human rights understood as political instruments of struggle and highlighting their ultra-positive validity on a political (and not moral) level, I point out some problematic aspects of the author’s theses: the overlap between universalism and cosmopolitanism; the twodimensional interpretation of global politics; the question of the agency of subaltern individuals entitled to fight for their own liberation using human rights