HomeInternational Peace and Co-existence Program
Prof. Tomoko KAKEE (tkakee[at]hiroshima-u.ac.jp)
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IPC Seminar
Topic: Gandhi and the Regime of (Human) Rights
Speaker: Professor VINAY LAL, Departments of History & Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Date&Time: Monday, 18 March 2024, 5:30-7:00 pm (JST)
Venue: IDEC Large Conference Room
Language: English
Details
Though Gandhi is routinely invoked as a key figure in the history of anti-colonialism, as a champion of human rights, and as the supreme advocate of the idea of nonviolent resistance to oppression, he could not abide by the idea of "rights" and in particular "human rights" as it is ordinarily understood. Indeed, we may even say that Gandhi, even as he upheld the idea that no human life was either without dignity or without a spark of divinity, was a rigorous critic of the notion of "rights" and of the framework of humanist thinking within which it is embedded. This paper traces briefly the evolution of the idea of "rights" in the West and the notion of rights-talk before moving to a more detailed exposition of Gandhi's thinking on rights, his philosophical, ethical, and political reservations about the idea of rights, and his anticipation of the Anthropocene.
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