Fabrizio Sciacca

Il mito dei diritti offers a sustained critique of the modern doctrine of universal rights by tracing its historical formation, philosophical architecture, and political uses. The book argues that rights are not self-evident moral entities but historically contingent constructs embedded in the symbolic universe of modernity. From classical tensions between natural law and positive law to the great trajectories of modern political thought, it reconstructs the emergence of rights discourse as part of a broader attempt to define the individual in opposition to the state. The study examines the major philosophical foundations of individual rights through close engagement with Locke, Mandeville, Kant, and Hegel, and then situates these within competing theories of rights, including utilitarianism, fictionalism, intuitionism, contractarianism, minimal-statist libertarianism, pluralism, and communitarianism. Particular attention is given to the unstable relation between rights and values, the redefinition of discrimination and tolerance, and the growing tension between liberty rights and social rights. A central claim of the book is that the contemporary expansion of rights language has weakened, rather than clarified, the meaning of rights by transforming them into flexible instruments of moral, political, and juridical legitimation. This tendency is especially visible in debates over property, redistribution, group-based claims, and ‘target rights’, where the universalist promise of rights gives way to selective and strategic applications. The final chapters interpret human rights themselves as part of a wider political mythology: powerful normative symbols whose authority depends less on demonstrable universality than on historically specific narratives of Western modernity. Against celebratory accounts, this book proposes a demythologizing analysis of rights and calls for a reconsideration of liberty, property, personal responsibility, and the limits of state power as the proper basis of a renewed liberal individualism.