Çağın Devleti ve Şiddet

Abstract

This dissertation aims to question an important promise that the modern state guarantees the protection of human rights, in return of a voluntary transfer of natural rights of people to the sovereign power, for the sake of security, to be seen as the very foundation of modern state. With this aim in mind, the problematic of the protection of human rights is discussed with reference to the relations between the state and the economy, by considering the three historical periods of the capitalist system, namely, the liberal capitalism, the welfare capitalism, and the neoliberal capitalism. The basic argument of the dissertation is that capitalism, in all the historical transformations it underwent, has had the tendency to create and reproduce violence structurally, and, therefore, that the claim on the part of the modern, capitalist state, about its capability of protecting human rights, is an empty one. For this reason, the dissertation argues, by focusing on the three important dimensions of violence, namely, economic, political, and institutional or collective ones, that capitalism cannot fulfill its promise to protect human rights because it is based on and continually reproduces violence itself. With respect to political violence, it will be shown that the legitimation of violence through the transfer of natural rights for security reasons in a utilitarian perspective actually leads to violations of human rights, contrary to the claims of modern state theorists. With respect to economic violence, capitalism, in a way consistent with Marxian idea of alienation, creates the conditions that hinder human beings from realizing their own potentialities and thus violates the basic human rights of individuals, who are nothing but some collection of “homo oeconomicus”, if they do not have any kind of economic or market power. From the perspective of the category of collective violence, which constitutes an obstacle to the protection of human rights, the production of violence within the context of the hegemony of the modern state and capitalism through the creation of culture, the culture industry, populism, media and information technology, and also through the production of violence in the context of imperialism, which should be seen nothing but a manifestation of capitalism by way of powerful states, and the production of violence through fascism, which is the extreme authoritarian form of the capitalist state. The production of collective violence by the strong states and global capitalist powers cannot be prevented by some international institutions and international law, which under the duty of ensuring and the sustainability of peace through protecting human rights. It will be shown as a result of the production of collective violence by the strong states and global capitalist powers, the cause of serious human rights violations such as wars, military interventions, ethnic and fundamentalist conflicts, mass civilian deaths, statelessness, and the disintegration of powerless states. As a conclusion, the dissertation reveals that the capitalist system and its product, the modern state ignore human virtues and produces violence and eventually causes the destruction of the „human” through reducing her to a homo oeconomicus. It is argued that the knowledge of human value will make it possible to see human as an end itself, rather than a tool, and that the transformation from a utilitarian human created by the capitalist system to virtuous human will be possible with the change of attitude created with love. In the dissertation, the need of a conception of human being whose aim is to develop and realize their potentialities and hence reaching self-fulfillment is emphasized, order to bring freedom, nonviolence, justice, equality, peace, honesty, reality requires, for the attempts at protecting human dignity and therefore rights requires such a conception in which the solidarity of the virtuous people by sharing love, and dispossession of property can lead to the unification of the multitude as “one” which is a new idea of anarchist form of life.