The point of departure for this paper is Anne Phillips’ concept of equality as enactment. I identify two interpretations hereof. The first emphasizes immediate enactment but neglects the role of mediating institutions. This, I contend, severely limits its political effectiveness. The second highlights the importance of such institutions in sustaining and continually enacting equality among citizens. To illustrate the pitfalls of stressing an unmediated enactment, the study analyses the experiences from the post-war evolution of Sweden’s educational system. Subsequently, I expound the political-theoretical implications of the empirical findings and propose a more institutionally cohesive understanding of equality as enactment. I do this by engaging in a close dialogue with the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet and Hannah Arendt, one of Anne Phillips’ foremost sources of inspiration, particularly Arendts’s perspectives on education’s role in modern society and its correlation with the concept of the world.

The historical turn in human rights studies is characterized by a deep cleavage between scholars who locate the origins of human rights in the Atlantic Revolutions of the late 18th century, and scholars who instead focus on the post-WWII period in general, and on the 1970s in particular as a breakthrough decade for international human rights. Against the background of what has been described as the threatened status of human rights today, we contend that the problem of origins remains as crucial as ever before, but that the way in which it is conceived is outdated and in need of reconceptualization in three ways. First, the historical turn should be seen as one body of literature with two distinct phases: one focused on origins and historical continuity and rupture, and a more recent, ongoing phase addressing the relationship between human rights and the concomitant neoliberalization of society and increasing economic inequality. We contend, secondly, that the debate itself needs to be historicized, and that the two thematic phases are rooted in two specific political, ideological, and economic contexts. The debate about origins relate to a pre-2007-2008 financial crisis era, marked by near-universal acceptance of human rights. Meanwhile, the issues of inequality and neoliberalism predominantly emerged in the post-crisis period as human rights faced more and more challenges. Thirdly, we present a theoretical argument for why the distinct issues constituting the two thematic phases should not be separated from each other. Indeed, in this setting, we demonstrate that the question regarding the relation between neoliberalism and human rights presupposes an account of the origins of human rights. © 2024 The Author(s).

The present article revolves around the notion of universality and its relation to freedom and temporal orientation in contemporary political thought, with a focus on Susan Buck-Morss' notion of universality. The purpose is twofold. Firstly, I discern and critique the historico-political premises of her approach. Secondly, I suggest an alternative historico-political approach to universality addressing the drawbacks of her approach. I present three objections to her approach. Drawing on Arendt's distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom, I first present a critique of the conceptualisation of freedom on which Buck-Morss' approach hinges, arguing that she overemphasises the moment of liberation. Thereafter, I turn to her reflections on historical orientation. My third objection concentrates on Buck-Morss' concept of universality. As a heuristic tool to expound on my critique, I activate the distinction between fictive and ideal universality as suggested by Étienne Balibar. I contend that Arendt's distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom efficiently elucidates the questions at stake in Balibar's discussion, as well as how his distinction points to the limits of Buck-Morss' argumentation. Ultimately, I contend that these critical remarks open up for a more dialectical approach to universality as a historical-political problem. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Mot bakgrund de förvaltningspolitiska förändringarna i Sverige under de sista decennierna, präglade av new public management, analyserar Tomas Wedin och Emelie Hantelius en av de snabbast expanderande yrkesgrupperna inom den offentliga förvaltningen under samma period: kommunikatörerna. Artikeln fokuserar på yrkesgruppens både organisationsinterna uppdrag och dess externa, demokratiska uppdrag gentemot medborgarna och visar hur spänningar uppstår inom båda dessa uppdrag som en konsekvens av kommunikatörernas strävan att stärka sin autonomi. Författarna visar hur kommunikatörerna i sin roll som länken mellan myndighet och medborgare skulle kunna verka för att stärka den offentliga organisationens demokratiska kärnuppdrag, men att detta förutsätter att de i sin professionaliseringssträvan inte låter blicken grumlas av den marknadslogik som kommit att prägla offentlig sektor i det senmoderna samhället.

The purpose of this article is to provide an account of an important yet overlooked source of inspiration in Samuel Moyn’s contributions to the historical turn in the field of human rights studies. It examines the impact of an earlier French debate that occurred within a reflection group for political thought, headed by the French historian François Furet, on Moyn's scholarship. A notable similarity between the French debate that emerged in the late 1970s and the historical turn in Anglophone scholarship a couple of decades later is the emphasis on the temporal dimension of human rights. However, the French debate placed greater emphasis on the effects of human rights on a society's capacity to orient itself temporally, while Moyn and his intellectual adversaries primarily addressed genealogical questions. The article highlights the different temporal aspects of the human rights debate emphasized by these two debates: as a politico-temporal issue (as seen in the French debate), and primarily as a historiographical problem (as exemplified by Moyn’s approach). © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article focuses on the acclaimed interconnections between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. I first turn to the thought of one of the most influential scholars on the question, historian Samuel Moyn. I unveil a hitherto unacknowledged shift in his historical-political approach to human rights: from a focus on what I shall refer to as a critique of ‘political minimalism’ in The Last Utopia (2010) to a focus on economic minimalism in Not Enough (2018). This is the article’s first, historical aim. The second aim is to criticize Moyn’s more recent position. I unpack my argument by drawing on one of Moyn’s most important sources of inspiration: French social philosopher Marcel Gauchet. Gauchet’s conceptualization of the role of human rights in late modernity (the 1970s and onwards) played a crucial role in Moyn’s first 2010 study; in his last publication, it plays a much more marginal role. I maintain that Gauchet’s analysis highlights the limits not only of Moyn’s latest publication but of the dominant strands in the current Anglophone debate on human rights and inequality more generally. The drawback of the debate, and thus Moyn’s intervention, is that it disregards the relationship between human rights and equality—in contrast to its great focus on human rights’ relationship to inequality—in late modernity. The strength of Gauchet’s approach is that it highlights the potentiality of taking the relationship between human rights and equality into consideration when attempting to conceptualize the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.