The dynamics between state and civil society: Limitations to human rights' effectiveness brought by the conditions of sociability reproduction

This article discuss how the laceration of social reality in two fields, state and civil society, leads human rights, as legal norms, to present validity and, meanwhile, insufficient levels of effectiveness. The dichotomy between state and civil society, typical of occidental European’s social formation in Modernity, has been universalized trough capitalism’s expansion. Individual’s social life is tore in two strange fields: political society or public life, essential plane where individual is a citizen equal to others under law; and civil society or private life, existential plane where individual is a concrete person, subjected to substantive inequality resulted from the typical aspects of bourgeois’ sociability reproduction. In this context, dichotomy suggested by Marx between political emancipation and human emancipation is explanatory: political emancipation is the relation between individual and its own freedom through state and is based on the recognition of the individuals’ rights (included human rights); human emancipation is the relation between existent individual and its own freedom trough the realization of its human potentialities, which are characteristic of its essence as active being and constructor of its own social and historical reality. Marx’s thesis is that the individual politically emancipated – the individual as someone who posses rights and participates of the state as a citizen – is not humanly emancipated under the existential conditions in bourgeois’ civil society, which is full of processes of alienation, reification and fetishism – and that happens because civil society disposes of ontological primacy over state in the reproduction process of social life. Then, thinking about the dynamics between political emancipation and human emancipation – or the dynamics between state and civil society – is thinking about the social conditions that nurture and sustain human rights: social condition in which individuals are not subjected to the bourgeois’ logic of sociability reproduction.