The Centrality of Social Rights to International Legal Order: Reflections on Alain Supiot’s L’esprit De Philadelphie

This article is a critical examination of a recent work by Alain Supiot, a French
legal philosopher and labour law expert entitled L’esprit de Philadelphie. The work in question provides a useful overview of some of Supiot’s major concerns. The focus of the article is on the philosophical aspects of the book as they relate to the modern understanding of the ‘rule of law’ and ‘human rights’. It will be argued that although Supiot’s Hegelian infl uenced conception of the ‘rule of law’ provides a useful critique of the contemporary neo-liberal ideologies, and an important reminder of the centrality of social rights to any viable understanding of the rule of law, important questions remain as to whether Supiot’s conception of the rule of law off ers a genuine alternative to the calculative thinking, destructive of the reality of the human person, which forms the basis of his critique of neo-liberalism. The article raises questions as to whether the existential reality of the human person is something so radical that it undermines the validity of any modern conception of human rights. The article concludes with an invocation of a form of legal thinking closer to rhetoric than to the redominant ‘dogmatic’ and ‘representational’ understanding of legal order.