Saskia Sassen

The Pluralist, Fall 2013

Abstract

Territory, authority, and rights each are transhistorical in the sense that they are basic building blocks, whether formalized and recognized, or informal but recognized. In this sense the most controversial is the notion of rights—once, formally speaking, the presumption of the divine sovereign. But I argue that if one goes digging into specific historiographies, one can detect a foundational awareness of something akin to what today we represent as rights. Rights, if we think about it, is a concept that takes on variable meanings even within a given type of statehood, such as liberal democracies or communism. Yet, in the end, there is a core meaning across this variability

View the article here: Before Method: Analytic Tactics to Decipher the Global- An Argument and Its Responses, Part II