The Public in Particles

This paper claims that republicanism and its focus on domination is predominantly based on a traditional understanding of politics that feeds off the idea of the state as the cornerstone of social life. Accordingly, the idea of rights that is offered within the republican tradition fails to grasp how rights are used at present and what we can expect them to do in terms of a transformative politics. While republicans embrace a straightforward division of public and private life and extol the virtues of the former, today rights are the vehicle for new forms of neither-public-nor-private law-making. New institutions are created through rights in ways that republicans would regard as inward-looking and sectional. My argument is that today’s conception of the public should be rethought along the lines of a law of the private subjects that dispenses with the tight division of private and public law and presents rights are law-making devices that serve as entry points for lay people to produce bodies of law.