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The Interuniversity Institute (INU) is an entirely independent, non-governmental institution founded in 1980. As the Founding Act states, it promotes the collaboration of academics with diverse backgrounds and affiliations in the field of human sciences adhering to principles of strict scientific standards.

INU endeavors to steadily enlarge the circle of people from different continents and civilizations who cooperate to realize the two major aims:

1) Freeing the human sciences from any Western-centered or other authoritarian arguments and sophism by researching and applying universally acceptable principles and methods, as it is the case in other sciences. Accordingly, the INU promotes research especially in those areas, where methods and paradigms can be developed that allow exact formulation, conceptualization in operational terms and inductive proofs. The objectives and approaches are detailed in the Founding act.

2) Contributing to the construction of a truly universal world civilization by systematic appreciation of approaches and accumulated knowledge emanating from the different living civilizations. (See Current main project.)

The field of activities includes - besides research - conference organization, lectures, documentation and publication (INU Press).

Indeed, the INU elaborates concepts and ideas, brings to light facts as well as proposes action. Although INU combats undisciplined thinking and the proliferation of information parading under the pseudonym of science, this self-imposed discipline in the creation and discovery of knowledge doesn't lead to a "weltfremd" mentality but implies a responsible approach to the solving of practical problems as perceived by individuals and communities. It also remains open to the discussion of any new ideas or findings with any group or individual independent of social status or prestige. This openmindedness, eliminating all considerations extraneous to its creative work, determines the INU's approach and spirit. The INU develops its own research program having its own priorities, disseminating the results for a broader audience, but it also serves as a clearing house for the communication of knowledge coming from others. The INU is a type of non-governmental cooperative university bringing together motivated people, a creative circle held together not by egotism but by common interests. It definitely doesn't try to perpetuate such traditional institutions as credentials and recommendations, affiliated or not, student or professor, full or associate, etc. Indeed, within the INU, dialogue is determined exclusively by complementarity and community of interest and knowledge. The INU is fundamentally against any form of self-complacency and fashionability.

As noted, the INU is open to the suggestions and arguments of groups and individuals from different cultural backgrounds without hierarchical considerations. It encourages, assists, and coordinates the work of individuals and groups following rigorous epistemological criteria.

In conformity with its goals the INU disseminates verified research results as well as verifiable ideas through its publications by INUPress and other modern non-conventional means - so far as these techniques are appropriate to channel scientific knowledge and do not serve as vehicles for undisciplined reflection however attractive the presentation might be.

The INU is not guided by other values than sound scholarship and scientific probity.

You can make commentaries by any of the above mentioned electronic or other means of communication. The INU replies to all inquiries.

For practical and financial reasons INUForum's "lingua franca" is English; however, as far as possible, any contributions or letters written in any other of the 6 languages of the U.N. - Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish - as well as in German - will be considered.

- Dirk Pereboom: Logique et Logistique. Une initiation. 2nd enlarged edition. ISBN 2-88155-002-9
Apprentissage pratique des bases de la logique et de la logistique, en 233 pages assorties de nombreux exercices et leur solution.

- Guy Ankerl: Urbanization Overspeed in Tropical Africa. Facts, Societal Problems, and Policy. ISBN 2-88155-000-2

- Théopiste Butare: Secteurs traditionnel et moderne dans un processus de développement. ISBN 2-88155-003-7

NOW AVAILABLE:
- Guy Ankerl: Global Communication without Universal Civilization
Book one: Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations
(Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western)
2000. XXIX+501 pp.
ISBN 2-88155-004-5 ISBN in Bookland/EAN 978 288 155 004 1.
$40 or 60 Swiss Francs.
Orders may be placed through your local bookseller or addressed directly to INU PRESS
1. case postale: 5044, CH-1211 Genève-11,
2. MITBox 397047, Cambridge MA USA 02139-7047,
3 fax 041-22-7341718 or by
4. e-mail: INU@INUGE.CH
5. site: www.inuge.ch , or
6. via: Amazon.com.
All orders must be prepaid by the following means:
money order to PostFinance : IBAN CH05 0900 0000 1202 5493 3

Contents:
Preface
Introduction
I. Communication and Civilizations                             1
The Problem, Approaches, Methods and Presentation
II. Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, Western Civilizations     49
Their Axial Institution and the Three Building-Blocks
(Shared Scripture of each one, Genetic Variation of
Breeding Communities and Collective Self-Preservation)
III. The West as a Particular Civilization                    119
The Identity of the Western Civilization; its Parts;
Afro-Brazil Amalgam and the Anglo-American "Melting-
Pot" Paradigm
IV. Globalism                                                 245
The Globe as Anglo-American Sphere of Influence
V. The Federative Agenda                                     339
From Hegemonic "Salvation of the Third World" to Co-
operation among Civilization-States
- Name Index with Bibliographical Reference
- Subject Index with Conceptual Cross-References

In preparation book two: A WORLD CIVILIZATION BY FEDERATION OF CIVILIZATION-STATES

This unorthodox penetrating study exercises a fundamental criticism on the bipolarizing approach of the Western social sciences and politics.

The "civilized West" should accept that there are not only major past civilizations but more than just one living civilization with which - at least in the foreseeable future - the West should coexist, as well as each one with each other.
Identifying these living civilizations and the problems caused mainly by the Western pretense of being a universal civilization is the main concern of this work.
This first volume outlines the Arabo-Muslim, Chinese, Indian and Western civilizations according to their own anthropological, material and scriptural building-blocks. Because - beyond the present Western "civilization of business" - every other civilization ranks these 3 fundamentals differently and practices a different scale of values, each also has a distinct axial institution.
Within the Western world the interplay of the Anglo-American core, the Latin-Catholic periphery and the Diaspora is treated and contrasted with the Chinese and Indian civilization-states as well as with the countries of the Arabo-Muslim civilization brought together in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).
In relation to the Western-inspired tendency toward globalism projected by a New-York-type cultural pattern and melting pot, the Brazilian model is also discussed as a more attractive one for the integration of the African civilization complexes.
The last, concluding part of the book introduces the second book. It proceeds with the falsification of the Manichean formula of the Western mind set which divides the world into East-West, North-South or more precisely into West and Non-West; consequently it looks for a valid replacement of so-called West-Third World dialogue by a round table of civilizations. Therefore the second book will design the passage from an unauthentic duologue to a worldwide dialogue based on civilizational pluralism.

- Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU Societal Research Series. Geneva: INU Press, 2000. 530 pp.

Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU Societal Research Series. Geneva: INU Press, 2000. 530 pp.

Urbanization Overspeed in Tropical Africa: Facts, Social Problems, and Policy.

Salvatore, Dominique: African Development Prospects: A Policy Modelling Approach , p.70, 1989

Experimental Sociology of Architecture: A Guide to Theory, Research, and Literature. Studies in the Social Sciences Nr 36. New York – Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1981. 564 pp. ( Paperback edition1983).

McGuire, W.: Constructing Social Psychology: Creative and Critical Aspects. p.105,1999

Fletcher, R et al: The Limits of Settlement Growth. New Studies in Archaeology. p.151, 1995

Architects’ Journal, 1982

Towards a Social Contract on a Worldwide Scale. ILO Research Series Nr 47. Geneva: ILO, 1980. 50 pp.

Beyond Monopoly Capitalism and Monopoly Socialism: Distributive Justice in a Competitive Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978. 117 pp. (Paper ed. 1979).

ARTICLES

The Relativity of Human Rights within the era of society based on contracts between equals.

Stages of Globalization: Priority for Co-operation among Civilization-states instead of New York-type Global Mixing of Individuals by Migration (Dialogue among spheres of civilizations – the Key to safe future)

Proceedings of the 14^th Annual Conference of Global Awareness Society International. Bloomsburg University, 11.2005

The Relative Social Coherence or Connectedness in Europe given by a Preference Indicator of Telecommunication (With Dirk Pereboom).

Communications & Strategies. Montpellier, 1.1995. Pp. 117-130. and Cahiers de sociologie économique et culturelle. Univerité du Havre, 23. 6.1995, 123-134 l.

Theses on Migration, on Society Mixed with Natives and Immigrants and on Relation between Societies of Different Civilizations.

Traditional Construction and the Immediate Improvement of Tropical Africa’s Housing Conditions in the Urban Sprawls.

Actes de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. Brussels, 1984. Pp. 77-99.

Rapid Urbanization in the Third World, with Special Reference to Tropical Africa.

An Antibibliography of Book Titles Listed in Well-known Special Bibliographies and Review Journals: A Research in Applied Epistemology. INUForum. Geneva, 1983. Pp. 1-26.

What Makes the Present Economic Trend Critical and the Economic Policy Open to Criticism in the OECD-Countries? INUForum. Geneva, 1982. Pp. 1-7.

Criteria for Ensuring Every Child’s Right to the National Welfare by means of the Family Allowance.

LIVRES

- Urbanisation rapide en Afrique Tropicale : Faits, conséquences et politiques sociétales. Paris-Abidjan-Dakar-Lomé: Berger-Levrault & Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1987. 180 p.

- Sociologues allemands : Etudes de cas en sociologie historique et non-historique avec le dictionnaire analytique de « L’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme » de Max Weber. Coll. Langages. Neuchâtel-Paris: La Baconnière-Payot, 1972. 316 p.

Moscovici, Serge etc.: The Invention of Society : Psychological Explanations for Social Phenomena. 1999

Contemporary Sociology, 1977

- Communauté et Société : l’âge écologique et l’âge économique. Carnet bleu. Montréal : Les Presses Universitaires, 1970. 50 p.

- Concept de l’investissement humain comme aspect de la politique de répartition. (Thèse de doctorat). Ed. élargie : L’épanouissement de l’homme dans les perspectives de la politique économique. Coll. Internationale des Sciences Sociales et Politiques. Paris-Köln: Sirey-Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965. 266 p.

ARTICLES

La coexistence des sphères de civilisations. De l’Etat-nation à l’Etat-civilisation.

Urbanisation mondiale: Un essai de synthèse des aspects démographiques, politiques, économiques et ethno-civilisationnels.

Cahiers de sociologie économique et culturelle. Le Havre, 12.1990. Pp. 97-130.

Quelques données linguistiques sur la population indienne de l’Amérique ibéro-indienne.

Développement occidental, progrès sociétal et solidarité politique pour un pluralisme civilisationnel.

Sururbanisation dans le tiers-monde ? Urbanisation rapide, problèmes et solutions.

Rapide urbanisation dans le tiers monde et plus particulièrement en Afrique tropicale. Répercussions sociales et perspectives.

Sociologie de l’espace, thème de l’architecture : Méthodes et concepts objectifs dans les récentes recherches américaines.

Face au synchronocentrisme, la sociologie est-elle l’histoire immédiate de l’ère audio-visuelle ?

European Journal of Methodology: Quality and Quantity. Bologne, 9.1971. Pp. 209-223.

Pourquoi et comment la répartition communiste est-elle dissociable de l’abondance et de la gratuité générale?

Les critères pour l’assurance des droits de chaque enfant au bien-être national par l’allocation familiale. (Mémoire de doctorat).

Die besondere Bedeutung des Kinderzulagensystem für die persönliche Einkommensverteilungspolitik.

Spezifische Faktoren in stadtsoziologischen Analysen : Uberlegungen zur systematischen Analyse der Stadt als einem Netz und Struktur unmittelbarer Kommunikation.

Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Köln, 3.1974. Pp. 568-587.

The Interuniversity Institute (INU) advances scientific research according to universal concepts of science, without committing itself to a national school of thought or a particular ideology.

The INU primarily promotes the application and dissemination of exact knowledge in human sciences.

By analyzing postulates, premises, and basic concepts of scientific theories, the INU strives to identify and eliminate arguments implicitly or explicitly extrinsic to scientific reasoning.

The INU is independent of any authoritarian argument that might come from political authority, economic organizations, information monopolies, academic institutions, or individuals.

Within the academic community, the INU combats sophism, which by its implicit rhetoric obfuscates creative scientific research. For that purpose the INU develops and applies the methods of epistemology (e.g., practical epistemology for scientific criticism of sociological books), and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

The INU encourages all publications solely for their intrinsic scientific merit. It considers anonymous publications such as Bourbaki's, as a very appropriate way to restore scientific debate and creativity to their true concern, because anonymity prevents ad hominem arguments and the proliferation of self-serving publications.

It is clearly within the scope of the INU to consider critically the exactness of established facts in general. To benefit the everyday praxis of public life, the INU exposes abuses of semantics as well as inaccuracies in information that misrepresent the data of social reality.

By considering the present state of the human sciences and their position in the scientific community, the INU claims for them the same exacting stature that the others have earned for themselves. The Institute strives to conduct research according to strict scientific standards. Rather than perpetuating the ambiguous distinction between 'hard science' and ' soft science', the INU promotes research especially in those areas of the human sciences, where methods and paradigms can be developed that allow exact formulation, conceptualization in operational terms, and inductive proofs by falsification procedures (e.g., exchange, communication, and other spatio-temporal collective behaviors).

By insisting on vigorous scientific standards, the INU remains mindful of the societal purpose of knowledge, which is to enlighten and fulfill human aspirations - individual, collective, and social. Moreover, the INU's insistence on an objectivistic and experimental research strategy enhances the internal validity of findings and so prepares the ground for relevant and responsible action.

Experimentally controlled research applied to answering concrete questions also contributes to verifying the effective predictive power of science and so gives new impulses to further research.

Public and private organizations as well as individuals consult with the INU, giving advice and expert opinions based on interdisciplinary and transnational cooperation for solving technical, political or clinical problems. In order to assure the full usefulness of its recommendations, the Institute, with out necessarily agreeing with it, refers ultimately to the preference system expressed by the decision-makers themselves.

However, these preference systems are not completely out of reach of possible scientific scrutiny. The INU not only applies the science of decision-making and assists the decision-makers to reformulate their questions in scientifically operational terms, but it might also suggest categories for a discipline, called private science, in order to explicitly restructure a preference system.

This is an on-line publication. Articles can either be added as a new entry or replace a previous version. Thus each point in time an "up-to-date" version is delivered.

The West and the confrontation between Islamism, the political Islam and the Zionism, the political Judaism.

Foundation of the universality of knowledge; universals of civilizations; prolegomenous questions in research; scientific methods of criticism (metalanguage of science, conceptual and terminological analysis).

Patterns of external spatio-temporal behavior; categories for handling of introspective data and of self-decision; "equations" with normative and behavioral terms for complex personal decision-making.

Economics and ecology; systematic interaction of human social entities with the whole non-human sphere.

Operationalization of the system of public objectives; usable knowledge (applied science, trial and error) for societal and physical planning; complex (interactive) models.

Sciences have their internal dynamics, since in most instances a new question is implied in the response given to a previous one. The history of science shows, however, that the selection of issues that receive priority, and to which are allocated material as well as intellectual means, does not necessarily proceed according to the inner logic of the science in question, but is largely determined by extrinsic factors, such as: authoritarianism, personality cult, position of power, political opportuneness that makes certain subjects fashionable (e.g., the energy crisis following the Middle East war in 1974). INU considers research priorities independently of these considerations and intends to counterbalance these tendencies with its limited means.

The determination of research priorities is an opportunity to return to essentials. As a matter of fact, recently the over-abundance of means generated a plethora of dubious, ephemeral, and theoretically unreflected data (esp. polls, survey and interview data) that obstruct outlook and encumber clear perspectives. In order to prevent further wasting of human and material resources, INU doesn't contribute to the proliferation of pseudo-scientific publications that serve personal promotion or vanity unnecessarily overloading our information systems. To this end INU often publishes research results anonymously and determines research priorities only according to its own criteria.

In general terms, INU considers it imperative for the development of the human sciences today that assumptions inherent in the concepts used be revisited and made explicit before generating new data. In the light of this conceptual control, data should be reevaluated, unreliable or invalid data discarded from data banks (however costly their production proved to be), and other data should be reinterpreted in this perspective.

The subsequent list of priority research topics doesn't claim to be exhaustive but represents an invitation to reflection. At the same time INU has neither the intention nor the means to carry out research on all these questions on its own, but rather submits them as suggestions to fellow researchers.

1. Issues of the epistemology and sociology of scientific knowledge (esp. human sciences).

What are the requirements for a publication to be called a "communication in human sciences"?

How can it make its content controllable in order to detach scientific knowledge from journalism at least as clearly as a publication in physical science does?

Anatomization: syntactic rules, terms (defined technical and non-technical terms: e.g., verbs), direct (experimental) or indirect (inferential) falsifiability.

Which format facilitates (or hinders) the scientific control of the publication's content?

Pragmatics of scientific communication process; texts and hypertexts, transparency (formal versus natural language) and exclusion of distracting extrascientific argumentation (such as terms with affective connotation, stylistic prowess, unproductive professional ritual and mannerism, plain authoritarian arguments).

By which procedure can scientific criticism (book reviews, etc.) fulfill its control function?

Development of scientific methodology for criticism (metalanguage of practical epistemology, criticism of actual book review praxis of scientific periodicals).

Threshold of scientific communication: the entry of a title in a special bibliography. Elements and construction of a scientific title. Methods for automatic selection and abstracting. Thesaurus construction.

How should coexisting civilizations be enumerated as geopolitical blocks? How can current geographical and political labeling prejudge the enumeration of actually coherent blocks?

How is the spatio-temporal variety of living civilizations being reduced to a mainly temporal succession of civilizations, (from "aires" to "ères") a globalistic doctrine of econo-centered development?

How does the different approach to international social policy and humanitarian action delineate and classify subsidiarily coexisting civilizations?

Degrees of solidarities... Universalist-altruistic versus particularist...Solidarity by shared script(ure), ancestral affiliation (race-preservation) and/or shared collaboration for livelihood (collective self-preservation).

Are true universals of a world civilization in the making or just one-sidedly Western values and categories diffused by global communication?

Coexisting and dominant civilizations. (Criteria for their enumeration and mapping... Classifications... Ideo-pictographic... Alphabetic scripts... Oral...Categorial and conceptual arrangement of their thoughts.)

Civilizational interactions. Descriptive assessment of the world's communication networks and flows with their dominant positions (Nodes of diffusion...The unique position of American-English... Broadcasting telemedia versus reciprocal processes... Existing systems, tendencies, policies...)

The universal character of specific scientific knowledge (Conditions... Characteristics... Proofs through its predictive power and replicability in application.)

Underlying assumptions of concepts and theories. (Universals of general models.. in systems theory.)

Their assessment from this viewpoint...Relative effectiveness of scientific problem-solving...Inadequacy of end-means dichotomy models... Non-analytical, action-oriented, interactive and other problem-solving procedures... Immediacy of goal achievement... Satisfaction...
Behavior of other mammalia in life situations.

How can social behavior be studied exclusively by correlations between external (physical) variables?

Spatio-temporal substrata of communication networks and structures. Face-to-face communication and telecommunication systems. Transformation by transportation. (Telecommunication- transportation tradeoff.)

Natural and architectural space variables. Sociological experimentation in built (artificial) space systems.

4. Issues in the study of the transposition of ecological phenomena into economic terms (the economics of primary resources).

Pricing of rare, non-renewable resources... Absolute ground rent...Differential ground rent... Urban land.. Artificial rarity and speculation... Oil prices expressed in the price of gold...

How is the predictive power of a body of knowledge a criterion for its scientificalness?

Extrapolations and models..Limits in time and scope...Supervention as insufficient proof. (Incidental occurrence...Futurological sophism: repercussion of published predictions on future events and thus unverifiability of the epistemological value of past predictions. Self-fulfilling prophecy.) Modern augury: deliberate use of ideological effects ("Historical necessity", Cassandran alarmism, doomsday catastrophism...)

The exhaustive listing of alternative policy options...Tacitly accepted taboos and disregard of some possible scenarios. (E.g., Evaluation of the OECD's forecastings... Model adequacies. Dichotomic reasoning and suboptimal policy decisions: either unemployment or inflation...either unemployment or technological stagnation...)

What is the relation between categories of personal value judgment, those of collective choice, and those of external observation?

Value judgments objectivized in rhetorical policy justification. Goal-setting and decision-making...

Distributive and competitive systems...Archaic and technological progress-oriented...Other bipolarities...

How to measure the discrepancy between the rhetorics of ideal-type and the functioning of real-type systems?

Societal policy as a general, value order setting model...Political competence distribution among decision-making centers...

Efficient overall use of resources... (Discrepancy in growths of stock, shares, production and employment...) Production, distribution and conservation... with spec. emphasis on processes besides national accounts (Informal and quaternary sector...)

The measure of eudemonia by its negative, the manifest negation of the value of life... Objective description. (Demographic... Of personal history... Life-cycles... Health... Life-long contacts... Social frequentations... Other activities.)

How can a counselor enter into the private science of self? How can he revise categories of self-image and enumerate alternatives?

CURRENT MAIN RESEARCH PROJECT
"GLOBALISM": GLOBAL COMMUNICATION WITHOUT UNIVERSAL CIVILIZATION
(5 active civilizations and the 3 elements of social cohesion)
Abstract

It is well-known: our time's (a) instantaneous telecommunication, (b) worldwide (jet air) mass transportation and (c) increasing world trade globalize the social connectedness or coherence.

The social cohesion itself is structured by (a) social heritage preserved by various Scriptures, (b) parenthood for race-preservation and (c) collaborative (eco-)resource management for self-preservation.

Global Age and its rhetoric of "globalism" doesn't bring spontaneously universal civilization but rather the ambition for global hegemony of (1) the so-called "West", which does not recognize the necessity of civilizational cooperation based on reciprocal interdependence.

This corresponds to the tenet that the Western ideology, the economism, attributes to the model, which will and should be imitated by all. The vitality of the existing civilizations having other cardinal institutions and other core values than the Western ones such as (2) the Chinese and peri-Chinese (Japanese, Korean), (3) the Hindu, (4) the Muslim (originating in the Arabic Scripture of the Koran) and (5) the Brazilian (Afro-Euro-Indian) - American - alloy is denied, archaized and ostracized.

In short, we approach the exposed scope of the problem by identifying the active civilizations of our age as actors by their coherence and actual cohesion, as well as their specific relations and interactions. If we conjecture the existence of the enumerated actors, we do not privilege the relation between the West and Non-West but study all 10 competitive and cooperative relations between them. Finally, we overcome the Western-centered viewpoint also by asking the representative intellectuals of each civilization considered not only to discuss its own but in parallel all the 5 civilizations with its 10 relations. (See also G. Ankerl: Variation of the Concept According to Different Civilizations in Democracy and Tolerance UNESCO, Paris, 1995, pp. 59-78.)

In 2000 we published the results of the first phase of the project (see INU Press) and work on the second one: A World civilization by Federation of civilization-states.

In my book on the peaceful coexistence of geopolitical spheres (Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese and Western) and in my papers published also in Hungarian, furthermore, in my article published in Magyar Nemzet on 10 April 2010 under the heading "What Can the West Do in the Interest of Reconciliation With the Arab-Muslim Sphere?" I expounded the independent nature of the Arab-Muslim cultural community. The flared-up popular movements raise the question of how they can be interpreted in a long-term and global perspective.

We can pick out two aspects in the objective description of the phenomenon. One: it can be considered as a new feature that, unquestionably and surprisingly, rather than arising under Western motivation, the movement was generated in the Arab-Muslim world itself, and it spread like wildfire, almost completely embracing the sphere of Arab speakers, be they Shi'i or Sunni populations. (For example, Sunni Muslims live in Tunisia and Egypt, while the majority is Shi'i in Bahrain.) Another neglected aspect can be related to this, namely the fact that this is not some kind of boundless internationalist movement guided by the slogan of "Proletarians of the world, unite!" In addition to the domestic demands of democratic rule, an important role is also played in the movements by the fact that the rule of the more or less despotic kings, princes (sultans), and other tyrants was not legitimized by referenda but basically by the western recognition of their power. (See the idea of the influential Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, Washington, that the US Government should continue to support with its advice the continuance of the oil-producing principalities, and attempt to replace the remaining autocrats with not yet compromised pro-Western "pro-consuls.") Therefore, it is not just an uprising but also a fight for independence that is going on in the Arab-Muslim world.

The West places its strategy on the comfortable world view that, outside its own sphere of civilization, it only recognizes the Chinese and perhaps Indian independent existence, and considers these competitive with its own only to the extent that they copy (to use Bill Clinton's words) the western market democracy. However, as the Arab-Muslim world has not yet managed to establish a state comprehensively representing its civilization (like, in addition to China and India, the United States in the West), the West simply ignores the interconnection of the Arab-Muslim geopolitical sphere, and in fact is treating it in its own way with salami tactics. Its moguls have been given the task to deepen the conflicts between Shi'i and Sunni Muslims, Arab and non-Arab Muslims - and the (pre-nationalism) tribal conflicts - although in its community striving for unity (ummah), Islam is the least discriminative doctrine regarding origin and nationality. I would note that we are only dealing here with the religious issue in so far as it is a cohesive force in a geopolitical sphere.

The majority of rebels coming from anonymous Muslim families - whether they practice their religion or not - probably were not members of the persecuted Muslim Brotherhood founded by the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna in 1928, whose membership was decimated by the dictatorial regimes. However, as the founder's grandchild Tariq Ramadan (who was naturalized in Geneva and is currently lecturing in Oxford) points out in his works, this multi-faceted movement that does not strive for exclusiveness, which has been fighting with political means for the independence of the Arab-Muslim cultural community from the very beginning, will perform an important role in the Muslim world of the new self-governments through its organization and widespread reach.

The question arises: what is the western trend based on, which ignores the ummah? Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, writes in the 3 February 2011 issue of The New York Times under the title "Israel, Alone Again?": "In its relationship with the Palestinians, Israel is Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel remains David."

Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, the connection of the Arab-Muslim world has to be realized and recognized. The attempts at division and the wars waged on individual countries like Iraq or Afghanistan - possibly Iran - only lead to the West bleeding (to death), consequently, also to its geopolitical weakening against China.

We must start from the paradigm that when the West only supports Israel by demanding certain justified conditions - like ending the illegal colonization of Palestine - and adherence to these, our geopolitical sphere is not in an irreconcilable conflict with the Arab-Muslim world. If this in turn corresponds to international political reality, the West must strive for conciliation with the Muslim world as between equals, which would take the sting out of the extremist Islamic movements that are mistrustful of the West.

A historic opportunity is provided for this by the Muslim population's potent action for its all-embracing (both in terms of democratic rule in the country and international independence) self-determination, demanding a political system that is compatible with, even if not identical to the western model. This is the international significance of the current uprisings for us.

However, let us briefly review the issues put forward for maintaining the western dissatisfaction with the Arab-Muslim world, namely the flood of Muslim immigrants, the oil blackmail, and the Iranian nuclear threat.

When we talk about conciliation with the Arab-Muslim geopolitical sphere, this is about interstate political conciliation. As for generations no Muslim country's army has set foot on European land, it is the West that has to give up threatening actions with the military, attacking, or occupying Muslim countries under any pretext. Spontaneous personal immigration is basically an internal matter for every country. Western colonization has in fact opened wide the gates before it, however, the real establishment of self-governance in the Arab-Muslim countries could largely reduce this pressure.

In connection with the current uproar, as well as to the biggest Arab country Egypt, the West is also paying special attention to the "less populous" Arab monarchies owing to their rich oil reserves. As for ensuring the oil supply, just like all, more or less rare raw materials (see metals), it is unevenly distributed throughout the world. It is a normal phenomenon that every country depends on the others in something. According to the modern, liberal model of free trade, (instead of colonizing them,) the resources can be obtained through world market bargaining. In reality only the 1973 oil embargo, which afflicted the West, has remained in the memory of world political consciousness. However, it can be established that this was a response to the western attitude in the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since Iran started to conduct independent politics, the West has considered it almost as a casus belli [Latin, justification for acts of war] that in the Middle East, in addition to Israel, perhaps the Persians will also obtain the nuclear weapon. Well, a country's deterrent potential does not in itself present a danger for all others. Only those deny this who base the world order on hegemony. Iran is not threatening the West. What interest would it serve for it to fire missiles at Hungary, for example? It was precisely Israel that did not accept the establishment of the proposed Middle East nuclear free zone. An agreement between the West and the Arab-Muslim geopolitical sphere cannot wait for David to defeat Goliath.

The Arab-Muslim peoples' democratic realization and attainment of self-determination provide a unique historic opportunity for the West to establish accord with them. Turkey's resourceful foreign minister could play an important role in this deal.

RELATIVITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: RIGHT TO LIFE (LIVING) AND TO PRIVATE PROPERTY (INHERITED CAPITAL) IN A SOCIETY BASED ON CONTRACTS BETWEEN EQUALS)

Following Locke and Pufendorf in the XVII century and then Rousseau and Kant in the XVIII century the Western Enlightenment developed, in the fight against the authority of the aristocracy by birth and against the spiritual authority of the clergy, a liberal model of society based on an individualistic value order (J. Beckert: Inherited Wealth, Princeton UP, Princeton, 2008. Original edition: Unverdientes Vermögen, Campus, Frankfurt, 2004, 29). This model is built upon everyone’s equal rights and upon a society constituted solely of ‘market-type’ relations contracted between individuals with self-determination. So man should be born into a society in which no social discrimination disturbs the equality of chance. (It is to be remarked that society has nothing to say regarding the in-born natural gifts but does regarding a given title, such as nobility, as well as capital transfer by inheritance. (S. J. McNamee and R. K. Miller Jr.: The Meritocracy Myth. 2^nd ed. Rowman, Lanham, 2009, 55-64.) This secular doctrine postulates that, since this reasoning meets the natural human sense for justice, the deduced basic human rights are (a) natural ones (inalienable), with (b) universal validity traceable to the fundamental principles. Therefore they are in harmony with themselves and do not require a principle of ranking. Finally, (c) the state is no more than a constitution of means contracted by free individuals. (Hobbes sees it as a “compact for self-preservation and protection”.)

Since in our time mankind is in possession of the technical means to construct a unified civilization embracing the whole world, it is above all timely to study the universal validity and applicability of the societal model offered by the West.

For this inquiry the United Nation’s so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) from 1948, as an institutional embodiment, could constitute an empirical basis. This list of rights draws upon the “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” from the French revolution of 1789 (modified in 1793 and 1795.) (G. Chinard: La déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen et ses antécédents américains. Institut Français, Washington DC, 1945). It was completed in 1966 by two international covenants.

First we will examine the concordance of the enumerated rights with the liberal fundamental principles and then the system’s internal coherence. John Locke and the natural right theorists presupposed a priori a harmony and therefore didn’t look for a principle of ranking. However, as the spontaneous unity of the human rights is not obvious, we must consider the ranking them. For paradigmatic reasons we will study chiefly how the ontological fundamental principle of liberal doctrine dictates the ranking of the right to life of man (including the means of living) relatively to the right to private property (including the right to inherited capital). This will be done on two levels, (1) that of the UDHR as a non-binding document and, (2) in light of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), in that of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

After these normative considerations we confront the liberal norm system with the anthropological realities of mankind in order to learn its relevancy and applicability. For paradigmatic reasons we consider, especially, that aspect of man’s anthropological fate that each man is not born as a self-supporting adult (“self-made man”) but as a dependent baby into a particular civilization already in progress and into its history that is well under way. Thus, for the realization of the liberal utopia, man is born too early and too late.

Two questions arise: (1) with these anthropological realities is it possible to reduce all human relations to contracts made between responsible individuals and (2) is the right of the transmission of private capital property by inheritance compatible with the equality of new-born individuals and their equal chance?

Willy-nilly the humanist value order of the Enlightenment is only one of the existing and conceivable ones [G. Ankerl: Global Communication without Universal Civilization. Vol. I. Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INUPress, Geneva, 2000, xxvi], even if the West tries on all the occupied territories (of Dar al-Islam like Afghanistan and Iraq/ to educate the children in schools corresponding to neoliberal prescripts, raise them then in its likeness.

Indeed, for neoliberal globalism the issue of the alternative world view is settled by portraying the Western one as rationally superior, while labeling the others as archaic. Eclipsing all others, the Western civilization should be the prefiguration of the future world civilization. Yet, the real prospective value of a model can only be evaluated in the light of its fitting into the given conditions of human beings.

As we just demonstrated, it is a primordial and inescapable anthropological fact that man, in opposition to some other mobile living beings, ie: “animals”, does not come into the world as a self-supporting adult. Consequently, before man can create a society with a network of contracts, he is at the mercy of the charity of the ‘full-fledged individuals’ community and its spiritual influence. Even man becomes only part of a determined human society as a speech community by learning “his” mother tongue. Before he can freely make a contract his parents put him, progressively, in determined, distinctive relations to his kinship, siblings, playmates (later co-workers), neighbors, fellow countrymen, to the followers of a Script, as well as to the other animals and the animate as well as the inanimate world. As a matter of fact, all existing societies are held together and function by (a) axiomatic (pre-)Script, (b) genealogical reproductive ties and (c) contractual exchange for economical and ecological subsistence (Ankerl 49ff).

The individualist prescript is one of many conceivable possibilities. In the extreme, ego-centered perspective, the individual can take the other beings in his surrounding as a simple means of his well-being and the whole society could be considered as simple means. (In fact the ego can be inspected only from the interior by introspection. Durkheim shows in the attribution of a soul to man the sacrilization of the individual (E. Durkheim: The Division of Labor in Society. Macmillan, New York, 1984 [1893]). According to John Locke, the relation of the individual to its environment consists in the taking possession of it. Possession of private property takes precedence over the existence of society (Beckert 71, 28, 7).

For example consider the case of a non-Western individual who falls into a Hindu nest and will be educated in that society. His first idea for survival will not be the appropriation of his environment by economic transformation but his adaptation to the universe. (For a true Hindu the present wave of fashionable regard for the environment, as well as for the rights of animals, seems a hasty patch up of the anthropocentric individualism of the Enlightenment.)

- first the principles of a societal order based on the equal rights of individuals;

- the concordance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with their requirements and its legal application in the ICCPR and in the ICESCR;

- in the case of possible contradictions among these rights the determination of priorities by considering, especially, the relation between the right to life (living) and the monolithic concept of all types of private property as a absolute human right;

- the role of private property (right of inherited capital) in the new system of discrimination and in the establishment of a plutocratic dynasticism.

- Finally we raise the question whether the anthropological fact of the state of human capabilities at birth does not make, from the whole construction of a society based exclusively on contracts among equal individuals, an utopia which serves as a rhetoric justification of the existing Western societal model, where, in fact, only one discrimination is admitted; namely the right of inheritable private property?

RIGHT TO LIFE (LIVING) AND TO PRIVATE PROPERTY (INHERITED CAPITAL) IN A SOCIETY BASED ON CONTRACTS BETWEEN EQUALS.

The liberal societal model based on the individualistic value-order was developed by the Western Enlightenment – in the XVIIth century by Locke and Pufendorf and in the XVIIth by Rousseau and Kant – in opposition to the authority of the aristocracy and clergy[i].

This model recognizes an order based only on the equal right to life of all individuals and on their freely concluded – market-like – contracts and commitments. In this manner man is born into a society where social discrimination will not hurt equal opportunity for anyone. (Of course, the society has nothing to say about biologically inherited abilities. It is concerned only with treating people differently according to social criteria such as nobility, but also, in principle, to inherited capital wealth.) The secularist doctrine postulates that this reasoning agrees with natural human rationality, and therefore the rights methodically deduced from these principles are inalienable, in line with the requirements of natural law[ii]. They are universal because: (a) they concur with the intuitive normative predisposition of all human beings; (b) they are deduced from basic axioms and therefore they are eo ipso in harmony among themselves; and (c) the state itself is nothing more than an instrument constituted as an association by the free will of autonomous individuals. (According to Hobbes, the state exists for self-preservation and protection.)

Historically, authors often stated falsely that the concept of human rights was first formulated in the English Magna Carta of 1215. In reality, the Carta’s human rights concern not all human beings but only individuals according to their social function or rank. The recognition of the nobles’ prerogatives was the issue.[iii]

Now in our time, when mankind has at its disposal the technical means – in communication and transport - to construct a unified world civilization, it is very timely to study the universal validity and the applicability of the societal model offered by the West. The institutional appearance of this doctrine is the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, when the winning powers needed to give a moral backing to their success. This catalogue of rights draws upon the French Declaration of Human and Civil Rights of 1789. In 1966 the U.N. produced two binding international treaties. First we examine how declared human rights conform to the basic liberal principles, then how the rights are in agreement among themselves. Where agreement is absent, we look for meta-principles that establish an order of precedence. As noted, John Locke didn’t give guidance on this question, since the believers in natural law presuppose an accord among them. However, general experience doesn’t confirm a general harmony. For paradigmatical reasons we give a high priority to the study of the relation between the right to life – to man’s existence - and to private property (including transmission of capital fortune by inheritance).

After this normative reasoning we compare the principles resulting from these ideas with the real conditions of mankind in order to see their practical relevancy. Again, for paradigmatical reasons among the anthropological conditions, we lay particular emphasis on the implications of the fact that the human being – in contrast to some animal species - is not born as an independent self-made man but as a helpless “unweaned baby,” dependent on a preexisting civilizational context. (The biblical Adam is the sole exception.) Indeed, obviously before men can constitute their society by free contract, all are exposed to the assistance and spiritual influence of adults. As a species capable of speaking, men will become members of a society by learning their mother tongue. So before the adolescent can contract freely, the educators of the little fellows give them a world outlook for coexistence and cooperation with their parents, siblings, neighbors, fellow citizens, with men in general, with other animals, and with the whole of animate and inanimate nature.

Two fundamental issues arise: 1) under these circumstances is it possible to base all human relations exclusively on free contracting among equals and 2) is the unearned inheritance of capital fortune compatible with the equality of all newborn individuals and their equal opportunity?

Willy-nilly, the Western worldview originating and outlined in the Enlightenment is only one of the existing[iv] world conceptions (even as the West, in occupied territories like Afghanistan, offers to assume the children’s education, putting them in school at a young age in order to form them in their Western libertarian likeness). Namely, the neoliberal globalism considers the value order of other civilizations on the premise that its own value order is rational and all others are archaic. It postulates its own value order as paradigmatic for the future and that, in the course of time, it will eclipse the others [v]. Yet, the pragmatic value of Western humanism for the prospective society can be evaluated only by answering the question of whether it fits well with the inescapable condition of man.

For example, in the eyes of those in the West who were socialized in an extreme anthropo- and self-centered[vi] spirit, all living beings that have neither soul nor the faculty of speech can be considered as simple means. For an ego-centered world view this handling of the external environment as a means can also extend to other human beings as well as to all of society.[vii] According to John Locke, an individual perceives himself by introspection and relates first to his environment by taking possession of property; consequently private property precedes the society.[viii] Now if we consider an individual born and raised in a Hindu nest, his first idea will not be to transform his environment by economic activity, as a Westerner will do, but to look for how he might adapt himself to the universe. (The Hindu and the Buddhist[ix] will consider our rediscovery of the legal status of animals as an improvised rehearsal of eternal principles.)

According to our working plan we examine first the doctrinal base of the human rights system; then we study the case of the right to private property and that of the right to living; how these rights are in harmony with the UDHR; then with the two binding international treaties; and finally their relative ranking. We evaluate the societal implication of the extension of private property to the right to inherited capital. In the end, we discuss the question whether, on the pragmatic level, the liberal individualistic societal model necessarily meets the development of the helpless newborn human being better than the value order of other civilizations.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE SOCIETAL MODEL BASED ON CONTRACTS CONCLUDED BETWEEN EQUAL INDIVIDUALS

Now we develop briefly the basic normative requirements derived from theenlightened societal model that disregards divine revelation. We abstract from the consideration that this model is perhaps unreal from an anthropo-social viewpoint. Rawls, in his classic work[x] with reference to Locke, Rousseau and Kant, elaborated his general theory - “justice as fairness” - and as “ideal-regarding principle”. It supposes a “hypothetical” “well-defined (!?) initial situation” in which “independent” and not “heteronymous” (cf., Kant) individuals make contracts[xi]. (It is strictly speaking an exchange or commutative justice theory derived from the market situation extended to the constitution of the whole society[xii] and state. Looking now again at the newborn human being’s initial situation, - and the saying “We are born into history that is well under way” – it is clear that the whole society with all its connections could not be reconstructed exclusively by exchange contracts.)

1.The first epistemological definition of the individual as an ego is self-consciousness. Independently, whether a Self comes from a homozygote twin or is a true unique individual, he is exclusively the concrete location of perceptions and feelings. This prime “vécu” can be perceived only personally, subjectively from the interior existence. Even Max Weber’s pioneering “verstehende” sociology could reconstitute someone else’s inner mental processes only indirectly by analogy involving all its epistemological uncertainty. This is the individual’s - the subject’s - inevitable primacy.

2. Each person, their plurality, everybody has the right to life, to existence, to living, to subsistence. This right has an ontological primacy; it is a substantial sine qua non condition for any other human attributes or disposing powers. (Aristotle speaks about the being and his property.) We can say that if this right contradicts any other right – for example the right to private capital or property or its inheritability - it should always enjoy a priority.

Let us explore an issue of definition and terminology that involves serious implications. If we will be truly precise in the formulation of the right to life, we should say “living human being’s right to existence.” This expression is a ponderous one but not without purpose. As opposed to the elegant expression “right to life”, it grasps the substance of the concept in its entirety. The right to life without a careful interpretation will be seen in an incomplete manner; namely, as with other rights – such as private property – it will be understood in a passive, defensive manner, simply as a right not to be killed, tortured, or illegally executed. However, unlike the nature of inanimate substances, life is a process. The right to life makes no sense without involving how life will be sustained. (If the Rechtsstaat left through indifference some people to die by starvation, the right to life in this state is not respected.) The fundamental point here is the complete definition of the right to life. We can add special human dimensions to the right to life, the right to existence proper to living beings endowed with the faculty of speech. Since the right to livelihood is an inseparable part of the right to life, we will use alternately the term right to “life”, to “living”, to “existence” or “subsistence” as the context requires.

Contrary to slavery and vassalage, the liberal bourgeois view proclaimed the individual’s “liberty” and “self-determination”.[xiii] According to the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 it is self-evident that (a) all men are created equal, (b) have the right to life, (c) to freedom and (d) to pursuit of happiness. Johannes Kaspar Schmidt, alias Max Stirner, in his Der Einzelne und sein Eigentum (1844) examined this issue thoroughly. The liberal position from the outset relates the individual’s independent existence to private property, which includes the individual himself as well as the necessary environment for his subsistence.[xiv]

3. The equal right is an essential foundation of the liberal model. By definition, all individuals have the same rights; inversely, if a right can’t be provided to everybody, it becomes a privilege and can’t be a “natural” subjective right due to everyone. The principle of equality puts limits on the spontaneous “self-evident” private possession of the individual’s environment. Indeed, the possession of natural resources, which are available only in limited quantities, is mortgaged by everyone’s right to access a source of livelihood. This universal prerogative - like the absolute (land) rent – presents all private properties as mortgaged. The disposition of national resources - as Clifford Hugh Douglas stated in 1919 – should be viewed as shares or dividends belonging to everyone.

According to the liberal societal model the individual’s equal and independent existence enjoys –at least conceptually – a natural priority. This is the posited initial principle for the constitution. The state or other social formations exist only as a function of the freely contracted obligations of responsible individuals,[xv] and consequently they dispose only on definite, transferred competency. (According to Rawls, man gives up some of his prerogatives – except the inalienable human rights - for security and some economic advantages.) In this perspective the state can’t be considered as a given fact. In its nature the state constitution isn’t different from a market contract or agreement.

4. The social philosophers who conceived the capitalist society were concerned especially with the prior right to private property – transferable by inheritance – and in relation to the state. Although the respect for private property has a biblical basis, these philosophers eliminated from their vision the divine creation, and were therefore obliged to look for other rational justifications for the natural right to property. Among the thinkers of the Enlightenment there is no consensus concerning that question of whether we can or cannot speak about rights in general before the existence of the state. The issue remains open how to distinguish in a secularized perspective between a moral requirement and a right without enforcement by a state.[xvi]

The individual right to property in its abstract general form appears to provide (a) privacy and (b) an external condition for sustaining oneself. (My house is my castle.) It should be immediately stated that according to equal rights, the private property necessary for privacy should concern only such objects that could be guaranteed for everybody[xvii]. (Compare a household farm plot with capital in money.)

One of the founders of Anglo-American common law (and constitutionalism), John Locke – and Samuel Pufendorf too – presupposes such natural rights exist before the state and enjoy precedence in relation to the state. The emphasis goes immediately to the “natural” possession of the environment by the property right and not to each person’s right to existence[xviii].

As Locke postulates the individual right to property as a natural right, he doesn’t do it by considering the other’s possible claims in a context of distributive justice[xix]. He considers only the right of an individual to possess, master, make use of his non-human environment. The initial situation is well illustrated in Daniel Defoe’s fiction, Robinson Crusoe. By the way, Rousseau recommends the reading of this work in his Émile.

On closer scrutiny Locke’s conceptualization shows that he extrapolated the general right to all kinds of private property from a particular historical situation, namely at the frontier of English colonization. In the American Wild West, the immigrants found fallow land. Since these lands were unlimited, boundless and available, the immigrant became owner of an “abundance of land” which had no market value by its rarity. The lot became valuable when he weeded it. The right to the fruit of his work became inseparable from the land and he fenced off this lot from the land of native Indians.[xx] In reality, the right concerned effectively the fruits of his labor. From this particular legal situation Locke, on one hand, generalized the right to private property to all accumulated, “intangible” goods like capital, and on the other hand, he introduced tacitly the right to property by inheritance (even if it is for the heir an “effortless wealth”). The arbitrary nature of this right is characterized well by Robert Dahl.[xxi]

Ownership transferred by inheritance reveals a lot about the liberal interpretation of individual right to property; namely, on one hand, this “money-making” is not preceded by an individual effort, and on the other hand, some individual already in statu nascenti becomes proprietor of such a fortune that he can live his whole life without working. By this “freedom” the heirs have the advantage of a good start.[xxii]

Let us see, after condemning racial, sexual and many other forms of discrimination, how the late John Rawls categorizes the differences of inherited wealth. In his already quoted work, entitled modestly A Theory of Justice, he states that the inequality of inheritance is no more unjust than that of intelligence The range of discrimination resulting from succession compared with that of nature could be acceptable for a submissive religious man but not for a secular free-thinker, since one discrimination is natural and the other social and man-made.

In order to avoid a shocking effect of this categorization Rawls adds reluctantly the remark that the inheritance could possibly be an object of social control. He says this control is not necessary “provided that the resulting inequalities are to the advantage of the least fortunate and compatible with liberty and fair equality of opportunity.” [xxiii] It is clear that assuming these conditions is not obvious. Rawls doesn’t explain precisely how “equality of opportunity” can be realized. He says also vaguely that the basic institutions of the society are in danger, if difference in wealth goes beyond some limits[xxiv] (cf., concentration of capital).

In sum, following the previous reasoning, we can state that the legitimacy of the individual right to property is not on the same level of preeminence as everybody’s equal right to existence. The right to private “possession” is deduced from the fact that man should master nature. Private ownership is pragmatically justified by the hypothesis that postulates that comparatively it provides the best exploitation of natural resources and a result that will be useful for everybody[xxv].

After establishing that in a consequent liberal doctrine the individual right to property does not have the same prime legal standing as everybody’s right to existence, we also state immediately that the “privacy-argument” supporting the right of private property can’t be applied uniformly as it is often done by application of Roman Law. As we will see, the right should vary according to the form, scale, or aspect of the property. It cannot be indifferent to whether the object is a family house or intangible mobile capital, and that the legal bearer, the “individual” proprietor, is a physical person, an individual or a corporate body.

THE APPLICATION OF LIBERAL PRINCIPLES IN THE HUMAN RIGHTS SYSTEM: CONCORDANCE OR RANKING OF THE RIGHT TO EXISTENCE AND THE RIGHT TO PRIVATE PROPERTY

Even if an ideal-typical liberal conception of society based solely on contracts between self-created, adult and responsible individuals is unhistorical and does not match human reality, we can still think about it. Now we call to account the consequent application of the liberal principles in international legislation. Namely, the charter of the U.N. refers to these principles. The Preamble to this constitution was the first in history to use the term ”human rights”. Based on this charter The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[xxvi] was elaborated in 1948. Mary Ann Gledon, law professor at Harvard University, describes how four thinkers, - René Cassin, the Lebanese, and Charles Malik (both specialists in the Israeli-Palestinian issue), the American educated, Chinese native Peng-Chun Chang, and Eleanor Roosevelt, president of the commission - composed the right catalogue in the shadow of the commotion of the Second World War. The UDHR adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on 10. December 1948 enumerates 30 basic human rights. Its survey shows that this catalogue – despite its loftily worded title - is not exhaustive and doesn’t bear the marks of axiomatic composition. It reflects without doubt the value order of the victorious Anglo-Saxon powers, while the Vienna Declaration of 1993 embodies a more “plural grounding”[xxvii], the plurality of the value order of the diverse (co)existing civilizations. Despite this fact the system of universal human rights is represented as being unified and indivisible, and therefore there remains no place for ranking them. The U.N. “unity resolution” in 1966 and all further U.N. declarations - like the just mentioned Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action - confirm the unity, equivalence and inseparability of human rights. This position doesn’t leave space for the rights’ ranking; however in the international “legislation” and in the requirement of the application we find de facto inequalities, priorities and neglects.

It is striking that the various international human rights watch organizations – emanating from the West - are primarily preoccupied with respect for free speech – and right to freedom - and less with the poverty-stricken indigents’ living conditions. When in 1998 Mary Robinson, then president of the U.N.’s human rights commission, exposed that in spite of a permanent solemn confirmation of the equivalence of human rights, the respect for economic and social rights are less strictly called to account. The liberal vice-president of the European Parliament, Berthal Haarder, wrote in the New York Times[xxviii] that despite the unity declaration of Vienna all human rights do not have equal importance, since for example contrary to political rights the respect for the right to work could not be strictly required. Glendon also says in her already mentioned book that in the affluent West we tend to concentrate criticism on the rights we don’t violate, - such as torture and slavery, - but we don’t say much about freedom from hunger and deprivation. As we will see later, at the same time, the right to life is interpreted in a narrow manner and separated from the right to subsistence, yet the U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 (ICESCR) in the second point of its article 11.2 recognizes the right to be “free from hunger”[xxix] as a basic human right.

The human rights workshops supported by the U. N. and held in New York and Hong Kong also expressed the opinion that from the liberal viewpoint political rights are overemphasized over the right to have an adequate standard of living (ICESCR 11.1), and the right to living, according to human decency, is not adequately monitored. Although the issue here is “who will live and who will die”, the international human rights watch organizations, Amnesty International and Freedom House, neglect this aspect of human rights and have a “misguided priority” [xxx]

In the Preamble of the UDHR the U. N. states that the “equal and inalienable human rights” are due to “all members of the human family”. The two first articles prescribe brotherhood and equality without discrimination, while the third article declares, beside the right to liberty and security, the right to life. The §17 declares in general terms everyone’s “right to own property alone as well as in association with others.”

According to the exposed basic principles of liberal doctrine (a) every human being has (b) the right to existence. This is so strongly a prime ontological principle that the right to private property can only be considered later mainly as a means to achieve the right to living; otherwise it can curtail somebody’s right to living.

If we compare how these two rights could be exercised, for the right to private property it is enough to declare passively the free exclusive right to disposal.[xxxi] In the West according to mainly prevailing Roman law and British Common Law, the property right is provided by the fact that the state – by force, if necessary —should prevent every hindrance to its free disposal. In the UDHR the right to life is also associated with the idea that it is enough to hinder any violent extinguishing of life. However if we compare the right to property and that to life we can observe their fundamental difference. While well-protected property is enduring, life expires by itself in time, even without violent intervention. For an effective right to life it is not enough to restate the biblical principle “not to kill”. The right to life does not exist without the guarantee of the means to its continuous subsistence. For this very reason Article 22 mentions the right to ”social security”, the § 23 the right to work and the § 25 the right to adequate “standard of living”. When the supposed exclusive private ownership of land or other means of production excludes others from exercising their right to livelihood, to work, - we can say - the entitlement to life has priority over the right to private property.

The UDHR of 1948 is an authoritative, benchmark document, but it is not a legally binding instrument. It can’t be called an International Human Rights Law[xxxii]. In the following decade the U.N. began to construct a legally binding international covenant. But meanwhile it became clear that because of the divergent interests and views of the different states belonging to various spheres of civilization there was not a spontaneous unanimity in the Assembly. The Western powers tried to limit the treaty to handle the political rights, while the former colonies and the socialist states tried to extend the treaty to the conditions of living. Therefore in 1966 the accepted international covenants resulted from a compromise: on one hand, the U. N. declared in the “unity resolution” the inseparability of the rights; on the other hand, the rights were not included in one but in two covenants - a political and civil, and another economic, social and cultural. Both have been accepted by the U.N. Assembly (2200A[xxi]) December 16; however it remained open that some countries accepted and ratified only one of the two covenants. There is also a difference in the formulation of the two covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is expressed in mandatory terms, while the rights of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) – often called second generation rights - are formulated in conditional terms as simple aspirations which should be realized if the resources are available.[xxxiii] Characteristically the U.S. didn’t ratify the ICESCR. We can infer that the Western powers with the U.S. first in line indirectly ranked the basic human rights.

We examine now how the necessary rights for existence are present in the first and in the second covenant.

Both covenants lay down in the first article of the first part two basic principles: (§ 1.1) All people’s right to self-determination as well as (§ 1.2) the people’s right to free disposal of their natural wealth; and that “in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.” The same principles are confirmed in § 47 of the ICCPR and in § 25 of the ICESCR. These principles are essential for the effective exercise and enforcement of the citizen’s right to living. The people’s declared right to the natural wealth existing in the country’s sovereign territory provides a kind of absolute land rent to secure the citizen’s subsistence. This is in line with the previously mentioned idea of Clifford Hugh Douglas about a dividend for every citizen derived from the use of natural resources. This prerogative has priority over the right to private property. (Note that the “right to own property” declared in the article 17 of the UDHR has not been repeated in either of the two international covenants of 1966.) This is a cardinal point, since it actualizes the requirement for the right to subsistence.

The ICCPR reproduces in 6. article that of the § 3. of the UDHR concerning the right to life, while the 6. article of the ICESCR states the right to work derived from the right to earn a living. Article 11. goes further since it posits the right to living in general, which also includes that of the disabled.

We can state that the two legally binding international Covenants give priority to the citizens’ right to subsistence (consequently their right to necessary access to the means of production) over the right to private property or capital equipment goods. We also can state that when the various human rights watch organizations are primarily concerned about the political rights and the freedom of the press and not the right to subsistence[xxxiv], they don’t act in the spirit of the two international covenants of human rights but to please the Western powers and the capital owners.

The right to life in a broad sense[xxxv] means the “entitlement” to living. It includes all the have-nots. It embraces the right to living, the right to work, as well as an annuity for every disabled citizen derived from the use of the national wealth, and the right to work as a minimal expression of right to living. Historically the recognition of right to work goes back to the International Labor Organization (I.L.O.) founded by the League of Nations. To counterbalance the constitution of the Communist International in Moscow in March 1919, the I.L.O. formulated the right to work in a manner that is compatible with private property as the means of production. By the way, the I.L.O. was the only specialized organization that survived the League and became in 1946 the first specialized organization of the U.N. The I.L.O.’s[xxxvi] inspiration is present in the two international human rights covenants and in the Charter of the U.N. in § 55, which promotes the full employment.

In the legislation of Western countries, the comprehensive right to private property compared to the right to work is expressed as a priority. The I.L.O.’s studies show that in the present societal framework full employment cannot be realized by the labor market and self-employment alone. The state or other non-profit agencies must fulfill the labor demand. While the Soviet Union realized grosso modo full employment, it involved grave consequences. Not only all private property as a means of production was suppressed but the free choice of workplace, and in general the self-determination of individuals. Individual autonomy became almost an unknown concept.

The two international human rights covenants that originated from the Western world of thought claim universal validity. However, following their adoption in 1966, in a pragmatic way, other spheres of civilization conceived their own human rights declarations, which integrated the value orders of their own traditions alongside the sole application of the individualist contractarian societal model. They try to put individual rights in relation to social obligations. Since man is born helpless without self-determination his rights are necessarily embedded in the rights of the family and other collectives. It seems necessary to involve communitarian aspects in the human rights conception against the West’s dazzling individualism.

It is not without interest to remind the reader of article 23. of the ICCPR, which states: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” Again, respect for the stipulation of this article doesn’t much interest the Western human rights watch organizations. Today Islam is especially preoccupied with the unique role of marriage and family in man’s procreating and sexual life.

Let’s now examine some regional human rights declarations. Within the Western sphere of civilization in 1950, - and before 1966, - the Council of Europe concluded a covenant about fundamental human rights that allows, - optionally and among others, - an individual to bring a case to the European Court against his own government. We also can add that the first complementary protocol of the treaty recognizes in the most general terms the right to private property, while the European Social charter, promulgated in 1965, mentions the right to work in a facultative and diluted form.[xxxvii]

When the Organization of the American States (O.A.S.) was formed in April 1948 in Bogotá, the American Declaration concerning Human Rights and Obligations was attached to the Charter. This declaration is not a legally binding document. In 1969 the American Human Rights treaty was established (c.f. ICCPR); in 1988, a complementary protocol about the economic, social and cultural rights (cf., ICESCR), and in 1990, a protocol suppressing capital punishment. The most important member of O.A.S., the U.S., didn’t ratify the three treaties, nor did the ICESCR.[xxxviii] The commission to provide respect for human rights has only an adductory and advisory function.

Outside the Western sphere of civilization, the Organization of African Unity - today it is called the African Union and includes 53 member states - drafted in 1979 and adopted in 1981 the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. This charter recognizes the individual’s right to migrate (§ 12), but it doesn’t conceive of the individual’s right apart from its rootedness in the collective. The second chapter posits the individual’s social obligations. It doesn’t rank political and social-economic rights but attaches particular attention to the latter.[xxxix] Respect for the prescription of the African human rights charter is not guaranteed by a continent-wide court, but only by the consensus of the states. Fundamentally, the cause of human rights remains an internal affair of the states.[xl] By the way, we can raise the question: beside the common burden of European colonization and the physical-geographical unity, what characteristics are held in common between northern-African Arab Algeria and the south Africa converted to Christianity?

And what about Asian human rights? Two decades ago, there was a lot of talk about it. Interestingly an important initiative came from one specific region. The former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, the erudite Singaporean diplomat of Indian origin, Kishore Mahbubani[xli], as well as the former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad encouraged the idea. Indeed, the Malaysian Confederation, after two years of existence, broke up in 1965 chiefly on an ethnic basis. However the problem remained that half of the population of the new Islamic Republic of Malaysia continued to be not Muslim but Chinese and Hindu. It served the interest of the unity of these states to popularize the idea of a uniform Asian value order and a human rights system derived from it. Meanwhile, the West accused its propagandists of using the idea to cover up the authoritarian nature of these political regimes. As a matter of fact, Asian values and human rights are a false concern. It is a debate without cause, since it is objectless. Asia as a point of reference for a civilization that is non-existent. The geographical entity cut out since ancient times from Eurasia is not based on some civilizational uniformity. It covers roughly the artificial concept of ‘East’, which became a metaphor for designing one of the hunting grounds of Western colonization.[xlii] Concerning guiding ideas, Asia is composed of Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Muslim thoughts, which have no unified common ground in contrast to Western Christianity.

Nevertheless, in the last decades some Asian regional organizations have been established: in 1967 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); in 1985 the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). While in 1981 the CCASG brought together the Arab States of the of the - Persian/Arab - Gulf. And in 2002 the sole comprehensive Asian organization, the Asian Cooperation Dialogue (ACD), came into being.

The objectives of these organizations are in general the promotion of economic development and the achievement of a position from which they can negotiate with the West on equal terms. Their charters don’t have a special chapter about human rights but the rights issue is embedded in the system of objectives of economic, social and cultural progress. Because of their cultural diversity, the member states don’t meddle in the internal affairs of other states, and, except in uncommon cases, respect for human rights remains the states’ internal affair.

The Western human rights watch organizations, swarming out of New York, are particularly preoccupied with eliminating the hindrance to the diffusion of the global media, and often criticize the non-Western regional organizations that are more concerned with economic human rights than with the individual’s political rights and basic freedom.

We will discuss shortly in the last part of our study the “universal” and “regional” aspects of human rights in a broader realization-focused basis. Note that unfortunately the regionalist praxis of the U. N. itself doesn’t help to approach the human rights issue in a larger less Western-centered way. Indeed, the U.N.’s regional divisions don’t reflect spheres of civilization that could eventually be characterized by some deep-rooted doctrinal traditions like Hindu, universist Chinese, Arabo-Muslim as well as Western. The groupings follow mainly physical-geographical ones, and even, from time to time, recent political divisions like the so-called East-European group of former Soviet satellite countries. These divisions also have no direct denominative civilization content.

The anti-racist treaty, the so-called treaty of emancipation, of 20 December 1965 constitutes an exception (2106/A XX). In its 4-8 articles the U.N. states that the composition of the supervisory authority should be composed in such a way that different civilizations and legal systems are represented in a proportional manner. In this case it is not the physical-geographical division that is the base of equitable (universal) representation.

Let us now return to the specific subject of the present study, surveying how the two international covenants follow the contract-based model concerning the right to life and the right to property.

- The U.N.’s so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 expresses everyone’s right to life (§ 3) and to own property (§ 17) in general.

- The exercise of these two rights makes necessary the fulfillment of very different conditions. The right to property needs only protection, while life without active constant nurture wastes away. Indeed, the § 25 of the UDHR enumerates elements necessary for the livelihood.

- Yet, the UDHR is not a legally binding document. The two U.N. international covenants of 1966, one, the ICCPR concerning political and civil human rights and the other, the ICESCR protecting economic, social human, and cultural rights, are legally binding. Though accepted simultaneously, the division of the rights into two documents reveals that the Western powers tried to formulate the first group in a more compulsory manner than the second one. The division also provided the possibility of ratifying not both but selectively one of the covenants. As a matter of fact, the U.S. didn’t ratify the second covenant and so, despite the declared unity of human rights, they became the subject of ranking[xliii].

- The ICCPR in its Article 6 expresses the right to life in a restrictive manner with the command “do not kill!”

- It is only the ICESCR that in its Article 6 recognizes the right to living and in this framework the right to work.

- Both international covenants recognize in the common part (I. part § 1.2) the right of all peoples to free disposal of their natural wealth and resources. This right is repeated in the § 47 of ICCPR and in the § 25 of ICESCR.

- The public property of natural resources could be charged as a kind of absolute (land) rent to cover the basic need of the population (people’s dividend).

- The right to private property can’t be without limit. This is reinforced by the fact that neither of the two legally binding international human rights covenants (ICCPR and ICESCR) repeats the right to private ownership, declared in the 17. § of the UDHR.

-The “marble tablet” of human rights is not an axiomatically consistent and exhaustive system. Therefore it could be completed. Indeed, it has been first by the convention against racism (ICERD), in 1981 by the convention again discrimination of women (CADAW), in 1984 against torture (CAT), in 1989 for the protection of children (CRC) and in 1990 for the protection of migrants (ICRMW). However, not one of these additions reinforced specially the basic non-peremptory right to living.

- Everybody’s equal right to living is a sine qua principle of the individualistic liberal doctrine. This right could be institutionalized, on the one hand, by the people’s mentioned prerogative to the natural resources, and on the other hand, by the limitation of the right to private ownership of capital goods by the others’ right to work, more exactly to the sources of livelihood.

- Finally, by virtue of the unity of human rights, it is inadmissible that the Western human rights watch organizations concentrate their attention arbitrarily and selectively with respect to some rights concerning the freedom of the press and other rather elite concerns, while they abstain from unmasking situations where the right to private capital goods hinders others’ right to living, since in the individualistic liberal model each one’s equal right to existence as a basic ontological principle should have a prior claim.

We have just finished studying how the fundamental liberal norms are reflected in the international human rights covenants. The Western Enlightenment considered as a fundamental achievement of the societal model composed of contracts among equals, the “restoration” of the individual to himself by emancipating him from slavery and vassalage. This accomplishment also included the individual’s right to private ownership of his (physical) surroundings without mediation by the family, church or other social institution. The right had been declared “natural” or “normal” (Locke) and added the pragmatic consideration that natural resources are used best in this way.

Now we look at how this historical achievement is working out in today’s society. First we raise two simple questions:

- In today’s society who are the major owners of the largest part of private properties?

In light of the answer, we will examine how the monolithic concept of property resolves into component parts in order to see how this right could be limited as a function of everyone’s prior right to living.

1. The ideal subject of the liberal owner is the self-interested pioneer entrepreneur – Robinson Crusoe. His private ownership provides[xliv] not only the conditions of his freedom but ensures the best use of goods.

The American constitution (which follows Locke’s line), apart from the state, which is constituted by the individuals’ contracts for service, recognizes individuals only as legal entities. Today, what is behind the legal concept of the “individual” who has the sacrosanct right to private ownership? In 1800 individuals as a legal abstraction were 80 percent individual producers, while in 2006 only 7.3 percent are still truly individual producers. In accordance with these circumstances, in 2004 corporations “as individuals” produced 83.5 percent of national income, while the truly individual proprietors only 5.2 percent[xlv]. (It is consistent with this picture that 80 percent of American citizens have no inheritance.)

The perversion of the “exemplary” American legal system is that most of the capital owners are no longer pioneers breaking up fallow land but are now corporations. Corporations (not inaptly called in French societés anonymes) are personified legal persons, “individuals,” who are freed from all kind of social servitude. The most important object of private ownership is no more the immobile inherited home, the family cottage with its symbolic value, but the intangible capital of stock exchanges, or even derivatives of the less visible private exchange or Second Market. While the pioneer entrepreneur taking possession of uncultivated land today has become – at least in the U.S and the West in general – a rare exception, based on this prototype and by tacitly extending the circle of individuals to the corporations — by this misleading terminology[xlvi] — the latter enjoy all the individual’s “human rights.”

By the tacit transfer of individual proprietor’s right to corporations, neo-liberalism safeguards the interests of global capital owners who can pursue international financial speculation independent of productive processes. The most celebrated defenders of the absolute right to property forms the so-called Mont Pélerin Society in Switzerland, including the late Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig E. von Mises, W. Röpke and today Milton Friedman. We discuss here, of course, only the human rights aspect of the neo-liberalism.

It is possible that the liberal ideal is only an utopia, but in this case it should be openly and clearly stated, and point to those who profit from the ethical nihilism and cynicism of its loose interpretation and application; the acceptance of the neo-liberal outlook has a negative effect on the ordinary citizen’s respect for the law and on social solidarity[xlvii].

2. We discuss now the right to private property from the viewpoint of the characteristics of its objects. The American constitution has been tailored to the individual independent small owner-producers. Although the constitution of 1789 hasn’t changed, the main objects of property have changed. Property can be classed by its purpose and use-value. When demand exceeds supply, anything has a trade-in value[xlviii]. By market transfer, all property can be expressed in monetary value. Objects can be exchanged by this equivalence and the size of someone’s fortune evaluated.

A first group constitutes the object of personal use, mobile and immobile. This is the kind of private ownership – personal effects - to which personal attachment or affection is sometimes related. As an example of this, the sacrosanct respect for private property is hammered into the heads of children during their socialization. If the exclusive and free disposal of private property could be limited only to this category of objects, neither the liberal nor any other doctrine would take issue. (Perhaps the familial or individual right of inheritance could constitute an object of discord. We will discuss this subject later on.)

The means of production constitutes yet a very different group. Of course, some objects are childishly associated with spade and hoe. In reality in this group we find very expensive objects. Often they enjoy exclusivity not only by their price. We can evoke the trade names that are protected as a brand. Sometimes a whole geographical locality or region is privately appropriated as a registered trademark and even the inhabitants of the region can’t put their own products into circulation under their place-name. It is clear that this right of private property could not be handled as a condition of everybody’s freedom.

In a third category we find natural resources. The unlimited private ownership of natural wealth could not be considered as a basic individual human right, since all international human rights covenants stated without ambiguity the peoples’ collective prerogative to freely dispose of it. Of course, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that some aspect of this ownership right could be temporarily transferred into private hands.

Finally, the objects enumerated above represent a monetary value beyond their physical identity. Today this value is expressed generally by a “government letter of credit” or banknotes. If it is possible to attach a price tag to any object, on the other hand, in our age the largest part of capital assets in the global economy can’t be visibly associated with physical objects, but only with a financial state. This is composed of various pledges, orders, agreements-for-sale, liabilities to pay, derivatives transferable worldwide instantly by electronic means from one kind of currency to others or to drawing rights. The private property of these corporate “liquidities” is the essence of today’s global capitalism.

When under the pretext of defending personal freedom and facilitating initiative, the ultraliberal school argues for the absolute right to individual private ownership, in fact, in today’s global economy, it militates mainly for the unlimited wandering of financial speculation[xlix].

3. Neo-liberalism posits the right to private ownership in a monolithic form. We now analyze the monolithic concept of private ownership by its components. This refined approach allows us to identify with more precision which aspect of the private ownership right can prejudice other more fundamental human rights such as the right of others to make living.

In general terms, property means the right to be in possession of value, and private property can’t exist without the exclusion of others. According to the Roman legal tradition private property has three aspects: (a) usus, (b) fructus and (c) abusus. The owner can use the object, lease its usufruct and convey his right to others by sale or donation, or in virtue of abusus even simply destroy it (the case of pure exclusion). It is a completely absurd idea that an absolute (unrestricted) right to private property of anything and all its aspects could exist. Fortunately the two international human rights covenants don’t posit the right to private ownership; but the constitution and laws of numerous countries “enshrine” it without qualification. The right to private property and the limitation of its practice could be judged only in the context of its aspects and in the light of the objects’ classification. A general, exclusive and absolute private property right could not be formed that applies uniformly to homestead, non-home real estate, immovable property and to variable movable, or intangible properties such as negotiable financial instruments, stocks, bonds, capital shares and other assets.

As already indicated, the exclusive use of personal property - if it doesn’t concern a socially indispensable object - cannot be truly limited. As the Common Law states, its disposition is “free simple absolute”. Indeed, this kind of property interferes rarely with others’ right to living and work[l]. Only this kind of private property can be considered an external condition for a free personal and familial life. Without going into detail, it is clear that the fructification of the means of production as private property or its transfer to possible annihilation could be the object of limitation on others’ right to living.[li]

We should qualify, by the somewhat abused word “speculation,” disposals, transfers and other movements of financial capital that look for profit often unrelated to the trade of useful goods. And yet on a global level these operations account for an ever greater part of the transactions. These transactions on the stock market and other secondary private markets can usually be recognized by their rapidity, volatility and short duration. Contrary to appearance, most of these transactions can’t be characterized as ingenious anticipation that is necessary to accelerate the market’s adaptation; in fact most of the time it operates by a self-fulfilling prophecy, taking profits to the detriment of central banks and states (bonds). Because the concentration of global capital advances in relation to the yet fragmented state powers, the specific survey and limitation of determined property sectors is a very timely task. If its rapid spread is not contained, it can endanger the sovereignty of (indebted) states, and even more the entire national economies of small countries.[lii] As mentioned, these manipulations could be recognized among others by their speed, short-term, entangled and chaotic nature and therefore could be limited by appropriate international legislation.

The transfer of ownership (the abusus in Roman law) and the intergenerational accumulation of wealth by inheritance deserve special attention. Some capital, inherited by newborn children without personal merit creates discrimination that reduces the liberal principle of equal chance to nothing. Indeed, this free transmission of fortune allows some to live without effort, while others are perhaps even deprived of the possibility of work. The general effect of this practice on the societal system as a whole will be discussed in the following chapter.

The theoretical debate about the right to private property as a human right in general, shelters vested interests. As mentioned, contrary to the non-binding UDHR, the two binding international human rights covenants don’t mention the right to private ownership; however the constitutions and laws of many states do. We have here dissected the issue by its subject, objects and characteristics, and arrived at the conclusion that a general monolithic right to private property extended uniformly to all three aspects of ownership, to any proprietors (physical individuals and global corporations) and to any kind of property (family cottage or natural wealth) is incompatible with the most basic principle of liberal society based on everybody’s equal right to existence.

We repeat again and again, if the justification of the right to private ownership is to provide personal freedom for everybody, this justification covers without reserve only the personal belongings.

THE HUMAN RIGHT TO INHERITANCE OF CAPITAL AS A BASE OF “LIMITLESS” MODERN PLUTOCRATIC DYNASTICISM

The contemporary Western societal model is based on individuals and their equal rights. This means that the society should eliminate all of the newborn’s “use-values” that are produced not by nature but by the society. Reputed family names and all other social circumstances created by the society should not compromise the newborn’s equal chance.

Still the absolute interpretation of the right to ownership of private fortune is extended to its inheritability and other forms of transfer[liii]. Some infants could also be the heir-apparent of capital wealth. But not everybody! If we include in the private ownership of capital the hereditary right, the equality of the individual is impaired by the society at the very moment of birth.

From a secular viewpoint[liv], contrary to Rawls position, the inheritance of fortune could not be grouped with the “fatality” of inherited gift or intelligence. From the viewpoint of liberal doctrine, the fundamental hereditary right to fortune belongs to the same category as do inherited names or title by descent, since all these are not given by nature but by social decision. These are all differences attached to the person by the society, undeservedly at birth. Family and forename are relatively individual designations, but in an emancipated society it should not have more importance than a social security number, which also unequivocally identifies an individual but in a neutral, impartial manner. The enlightened legal system took aim at the suppression of the blue-blooded nobility, of “dynasticism”, of all distinction independent from personal accomplishment. To repeat, from the viewpoint of the social equality of individuals, the inheritance of fortune should be classed with the inherited pedigree of nobility and not with differences in native talent. The point relating to matters of principle is that contrary to a viewpoint of fairness, if the liberal doctrine will truly exclude indiscriminately all kinds of socially induced privileged situations due to birth, and therefore suppress that of nobility but not that of inherited fortune, equal rights are not served, since the new human rights system makes an exception, an econocratic one. The inheritance of fortune encroaches upon the liberal value order. By admission of this exceptional social difference at birth, the new system becomes susceptible to dynastic tendencies, this time to a plutocratic one, where the specifically economic discrimination of the newborns violates the ground principle of the equal rights of liberal justice — the individual’s Ebenbürtigkeit (Beckert).

Before we characterize an era by a definite societal phenomenon calling it plutocratic dynasticism and studying its effects and consequences, we should learn (a) what is the proportion of the inherited part of the private fortunes in a society, (b) how is the inherited wealth distributed within the population, and finally (c) what is the distribution of private wealth in general within the modern “democratic” society.

Studies of the “caste-system” related to inheritance of fortune in the bourgeois society are sparse and the subject has been approached in various ways.

a. The difference between total national wealth and the inherited one characterizes economic growth as well as the intergenerational distribution in general (consumption versus accumulation). We examine here only the issue from the viewpoint of the individual having an equal start in life.

According to Kotlikoff’s[lv] estimate in the U.S. 80 percent of the wealth comes from inheritance, while according to Modiglani’s different model of calculation it is only 20 p. c. Kesseler Masson’s model gives 35-40 percent. Indeed, the estimation is difficult since gifts, the inter vivos transfer, should be counted too.

b. Concerning the distribution of the inherited fortune, the largest part of the population has not inherited capital wealth. In the last years 4/5 of the U.S. population inherited no wealth. According to Luc Arrondel[lvi] in 1987 in France 51 percent of the inherited wealth went to 10 percent of the population; and within that group 1 percent profited from 19 percent of the inherited fortune.

c. The economies of our societies are characterized by large differences in fortune. According to the report of 2007 of the U.S. Census Bureau in 2006 1 percent of the households held 190 times more fortune than the average wealth of all households. In 1981 this gap was only 125 times. These disparities are higher than those within the income distribution, even if between 1981 and now the personal income difference also increased. (The U.S. Census data for 2010 shows the highest income gap on record.) For that matter, the difference in the U.S. is higher than in Europe, except for Great Britain[lvii] and the present American legislation favors the increase of the gap.

We can conclude that individuals exercise their right to living in our Western society in two fundamentally different manners: one will live from his capital gain by “negotiating” a good return, and the other, by far the larger part, should find a place of employment in order to make a livelihood. This is the basic initial situation for Rawls social contract. This is the division of labor and the accepted public order. Contrary to the privileged classes of the Ancient Regime, the capital holders now dispose of their fortune, formally and freely, without explicit personal legal obligation corresponding to their economic situation. (For example, to make the unused means of production available for the living of have-nots.) This tendency became even stronger by the freedom of the speculator to create artificial shortages of various global commodities for profit. Since capital proprietors neither individually nor collectively are legally responsible for the shortage of workplaces, the right to work can’t be recognized as a paramount human right. We have seen that the relative number of self-employed is constantly diminishing,[lviii] the difference between the two classes is not fading, nor is the passage between them smoother; therefore the situation could only be corrected by reforming the succession of property rights (cf., land reforms).

To identify a plutocratic dynastic republic, it is not only important to count the proportion of inherited fortune and the cross-section of wealth distribution, but also the permanency of dynasties from generation to generation - whether they experience significant changes, class mobility with relative rises and “come-downs”.

Charles Kerwin[lix] observed with his collaborators that 36 percent of the descendants of the families, which constitute the 20 percent richest in the society, could be found in the next generation in the same class, and that 36 percent of 20 percent of descendents of the poorest families also remain in the group where their parents were. Within the other social strata vertical intergenerational mobility is also very limited.

By the multigenerational reproduction of the functional social division between those detaining the capital goods by means of inheritance and those who look for work as a source of livelihood, the plutocratic dynasticism became a cardinal institution of the bourgeois society. The feudal system[lx] was characterized by inherited titles with rights and obligations attached. The new system guaranteed pro forma the self-determination of man and we call it progress. The political characteristic of the new system is that the class living from capital gain and investment - called the business class, largely the corporate establishment - as representative of the Economy has the right to be specially consulted by the State before any important decision[lxi]. On the other hand, willy-nilly in the representative democracy the business-class can preselect the eligible, since without financial support there are no viable candidates; and the fact that – following the suffragist movement (Sen 363) - in more and more countries, where the women and even adolescents have the right to vote, there has been no change in this basic state of affairs.

As a matter of fact, the development of the new bourgeois human rights order protects progressively all newborns from all discrimination by origin; however it makes a fundamental exception. The declaration of the right to private capital with the right to its transfer by inheritance institutionalizes inequality according to plutocratic descent, and the intergenerational strengthening of this process makes it the cardinal institution of the society.

In our bourgeois society this “exemption”, privilege is not even considered a disgrace, since the so-called “old money”[lxii] will be on display and is the object of envy. The virtuous pride in it is expressed by the naming of plutocratic dynasties. Family foundations replace the aristocratic houses, - the Carnegies, the Eszterházys - and in the succeeding generations of ultra-rich families, descendents add to their name a Roman numeral, e.g., Ford III, J. Paul Getty III. Since 1887 the Social Register enumerates the American elite. In 1976 the plutocrat Malcolm Forbes unified all the local Social Registers. Of course, some families die out, even if countered by admission of the female lineage, but 92 percent of the names registered in 1940 are also present in the list of 1977 and 87 percent of the original names in 1995. Half of them use the Roman numeral in their name. In 1915 a U.S. congressional report called the plutocratic system “industrial feudalism” and the new ruling class is discreetly called the Business.

Jens Beckert formulated clearly how the present Western human rights practice on this point deviates from the societal model based strictly on individuals with equal chance.[lxiii] Beckert also describes the varieties of legal forms of intergenerational transfer of fortunes – by inheritance or will – in the Anglo-Saxon, French and German legal systems. However in the plutocratic dynastic republics the combination of the right of corporations, foundations and trusts provides an intergenerational unity of the class living essentially from capital gain.

As exposed, the presently applied human rights system, in which the right to private ownership can counter the equal right of others to physical existence, can’t be considered as a consequent embodiment of the enlightenment’s model society based on the equal right of everybody. However, some try to justify on a pragmatic basis the usefulness of the institution of dynastic inheritance. They consider that entrepreneurial ability can be somehow inherited. Joseph Schumpeter’s arguments are well known.[lxiv] To imagine that the investor-entrepreneur’s capacity also runs in the blood of his descendents is a capitalist version of the eugenics of blue-bloodedness inspired to some extent by Darwin.[lxv]

This kind of genetic hypothesis is only ideologically founded. Multigenerational successes are not based on inherited quality but on socialization, on social pedagogical transmission: the helpless individual born in a wealthy family receives a different education and different know-how. He learns what matters, what issues the parents consider to be of vital importance to the family: it is not the quest for employment but for profitable investment. (Jean-Paul Sartre tells us in his autobiographical work Les mots [1964] that first he learned words from the family bookshelf and only afterward identified the designated objects themselves.) Further, the infants of wealthy families also inherit different networks of connections.

After studying the normative consistency of the liberal (ideal-typical) societal model applied to human rights, we now consider another level: whether this system is at all compatible with anthropo-social reality. In order to enlarge our perspective let us refer briefly to two concepts of Indian jurisprudence. The classical legal theorist Manu[lxvi] developed a consequence-independent, ideal-typical, rule-bound arrangement of justice (somewhat like Rawls), in Sanskrit called niti that is distinguished in the Indian legal tradition from the nyaya, which is a realization-focused perspective and which considers the comprehensive outcome. In the next section we will examine the issue of the relativity of human rights in the nyaya-like perspective.

THE CONTRACTARIAN SOCIETAL MODEL BASED ON EQUALITY AMONG INDIVIDUALS AND THE HUMAN-BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL-ANTHROPOLOGICAL REALITY OF THE HELPLESSNESS OF NEWBORN HUMAN BEINGS.

The constitutional recognition of private property as a fundamental human right – including the inheritance of capital wealth – is at variance with the liberal social order, which is based on everybody’s equal right to existence. However we can observe that in various historical epochs and civilizations some progenitors succeed – by diverse hidden or open ways and means – to provide favours to their descendents.

Usually historians look in two directions for appropriate examples: in the old European feudal system and in so-called archaic “civilizations” like the Hindu caste-system or the Muslim emirates. However a more objective impartial examination of facts shows that we can find cases of transmission of political power and social influence attributable to blood relationship of descent other than in countries with explicitly hereditary dynastic systems like Saudi-Arabia, Jordan, the Moroccan Kingdom or the Arab emirates. We can observe signs of it in republics like Syria, or even in the Westminster-type “rotating” representative democratic systems. In these systems, for example, the publicly recognizable nature of a family name gives close relatives a great advantage for election. This can be observed not only in India concerning the Ghandi family, but also in the U.S. concerning the Bushes. Examples can be multiplied in other representative democracies; as Adam Bellow[lxvii] notes, even revolutionaries who reversed unjust political systems often made from their descendents a – hereditary – successor. As we already noted, the economist Joseph Schumpeter imagined a kind of inherited entrepreneurial ability, while the also quoted Dawkins explained the continuation of dynasties by the biological inheritance of genes. Contradicting this biological explanation is the fact that widows of influential politicians in very different lands have sometimes “inherited” political positions like Christina Kirchner in Argentina, Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, or W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s widow in Sri Lanka.

We will here discuss the subject in more general terms than these single historical cases. We look for an answer to a comprehensive question: in the light of the empirical human sciences is there any chance that the historically unprecedented promise of the individualistic liberal doctrine is within our reach, namely that all social discrimination given by birth will be progressively suppressed? To answer this question we should establish an overall realistic conception of all human societies and their components. Undoubtedly, general experience shows some characteristics common to the human race. All individuals come into the world not fully grown, but as helpless infants, dependent on their parents or other caregivers. Self-made, without nurturance newborns can’t reach the majority. This fact is often neglected but is of great consequence. Then the question arises instantaneously: how to implement an environment of equal treatment of newborns without tearing them from their families by putting them in orphanage or janissary-like educational systems? (By the way, perhaps in the near future, this will be the case in the modern Western society, where compulsory schooling begins at an ever-earlier age.) Marx and especially Engels[lxviii] express great interest in this question.

The institutions of upbringing form the first social ties of the little ones. Consequently, if it happens in the framework of the family, the first ties are related to the blood relationship. Beyond the period of “suckling”, the formation of habits during the long socialization process with the mother tongue brings with it a whole cultural background and world outlook.

Whatever the parents’ motivation, whether self-centred[lxix] love or altruism in the upbringing of their children, they hope to be compensated in their old age. The newborn receives services without synchronous reciprocation. This initial situation can’t be denied in the liberal ideology. Living together under the same roof creates intense affective ties, even if they can turn negative. The landed property – family cottage, mansion or castle – symbolizes the parental home. By the way, the special literature about the right of inheritance concentrates largely on this problem. In different countries and in different epochs the experts tried to solve the problem of inequality between generations and individuals of different descents by various systems of taxation [lxx].

Yet, in our era of financial globalism, the problem of the family’s immovable property is only a small tip of the iceberg. The truly big capital in money is reshaped in the form of stock certificates and financial participations hardly fixed to a place. Their proprietors cannot at any moment identify their fortune in tangible material objects. We should now add to this picture that a donation or gift is a main means for nourishing intimate relations. It is obvious that the most clever tax-collector can’t catch all the intergenerational transfers, even large ones, especially if they happen through an intermediary or by off-shore trusts and foundations. (We can also include the donation of gems, jewellery and other small but highly valuable objects hidden in a safe. See Salter’s quoted volume.)

The socialization process comprises the relation within the large network of extended family. To the unavoidable circumstances of becoming adult - beside the habit formation – an intergenerational formation of acquaintanceship also belongs.

In the Ancient Regime and in other civilizations the distinction by birth has been formally recognized and accepted. Today’s republics, based on the individual’s equal human rights, postulate that socially generated discrimination by birth could be suppressed by further refinement, patching and enlargement of the catalogue of human rights. The completeness of the bourgeois human rights list remained silent about the discriminative consequences of intergenerational transmission of capital fortune (which could be freely used, without subordinating its use to the common good) by way of succession or will.

Among the advantages given by birth, the “nominal” one – nobility – could be eliminated by a stroke of the pen, but the advantages coming from the parents financial condition could in fact not be abolished because of man’s helpless birth and the following necessary socialization process. If this is the case, could the liberal Western human rights construct preserve its unique, supreme, universal stature?

WESTERN INDIVIDUALISTIC HUMAN RIGHTS IN A REALIZATION-FOCUSED AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Summing up what has been said, Western liberalism - following Locke and Rousseau – deduces the constitution of the society and of the state exclusively from the contracts concluded among equal partners. So for a large number of individualist authors, the individual with his natural human rights exists – at least conceptually – before the state. The U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 has fundamentally evolved from the liberal doctrine. It posits everyone’s right to life (§3) and even the right to work and livelihood (§22ff), but also in general terms the right to private property (§17). However, for international law, only the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and that on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) concluded in 1966 are binding. The U.N. General Assembly (2200A[XXI]) as well as the Declaration of Vienna in 1993 states the inseparability of all human rights. Since no contradiction among them is presupposed, meta-principles for ranking them have not been established. However, the fact that the ICCPR and ICESCR are distinct documents and could be ratified separately allows an implicit ranking of human rights. You can’t escape the fact that the Western states consider only the ICCPR as completely obligatory and so all ratified it even if with some reservations. Amartya Sen states that economic and social rights, which are excluded from the “inner sanctum of human rights” as so-called “second generation’ rights, should be applied only if some conditions could be realized.[lxxi] We also observed that the Western inspired Human Rights Watch organization as well as Amnesty International and the New York based Freedom House keep their eyes only on the application of the ICCPR.

The UDHR declared the right to property without restriction on intergenerational transfer. If the International Covenants of 1966 didn’t confirm this right, the constitutions of most Western states did. Then again, in the spirit of a liberal worldview, everyone has an equal right to living – “debited” on the people’s prerogatives for natural wealth and resources (ICCPR §I.1.2 and § V.47). This right of everybody should rank before all other rights since existence itself is an ontological sine qua condition for the exercise of any other rights. Therefore, according to fundamental liberal reasoning about equal rights for everyone, if this right of living conflicts with the right to private property, the latter should be subordinated to the first.

If subordination of private ownership to everybody’s right to live does not come about, certain newborns become proprietors of inherited fortune that guarantees their whole existence - perhaps without other personal merit, - while the existence of others is only guaranteed if they find a job and can join the workforce. Because this difference is induced by the society, the equality of chance cannot materialize.

This being granted, in the realization-focused perspective, we should confront the ideal-typical individualistic liberal societal model with empirical anthropological reality. As already evoked, it is a basic biological fact that the human being – even if conceived in a test tube – comes helplessly to light not so differently from the kangaroo as we sometimes imagine. Therefore, initially, a unilateral, social-anthropological “insertion” precedes, always necessarily and without exception, man’s emancipation, his introduction as an adult into the already established society where he can freely contract later on. The socialization process usually happens in the framework of family, generates multigenerational intertwining, and so makes the intergenerational transfer of fortune, by gift or inheritance, natural. The complete extinction of the differentiated inborn transfer of wealth could be realized only by fostering all newborns as orphans. This would necessitate the forcible shattering of natural family ties and privacy.

Again, if we accept human birth with family fostering as natural and unavoidable, we must acknowledge that there are profound implications for the value of the prescription of liberal norms.

In this case, we can’t impute a prototypical exclusive role to the contract among adult individuals, derived basically from the situation of market the exchange transactions in all human relations. Since everyone is born helpless, other social relations should be accepted as constitutive ones that are not based on mutual free will and individual choice with all its implications; this is the fundamentally unequal relationship between the helpless infant and his parents,

Yet, if we accept that by force of the human way of nurturing, it is, in reality, impossible to hinder intergenerational transfer of family wealth; and if the right to this transfer is not limited to a determined range of personal goods (including the home), but is formulated in a comprehensive monolithic manner, — in opposition to the suppression of the inherited caste-system or nobility titles — the “dynasticist discrimination” is not eliminated completely. It happens only that by maintaining intergenerational private property transfer to the newborn without merit, the system of discrimination now becomes concentrated on the difference in fortune. In this way the liberal doctrine, after the liberation of slaves and serfs, becomes, in fact, a subtle apology for the inborn prerogatives of the capitalist class. By the intergenerational transfer of capital wealth within a community, from generation to generation, the society becomes primarily characterized by a plutocratic form of dynasticism. While our society bears many important societal traits (the Information society and so on), it is for this very reason that it could be called essentially a capitalist society.

The inequity of inheritance without merit and the ensuing social disequilibria, as well as the loss in economic efficiency[lxxii] due to the spread of developing plutocratic dynasticism, can only be corrected by repeated property reforms like the agrarian reforms. However, contemporary post-industrial finance is organized on a worldwide scale and operates trans-nationally, scattered and unobserved. And the states, the various jurisdictions – even the largest like the U.S.A., China, India or Russia – are organized on a smaller geographical level. For the time being – since we can only dream about a world state - no efficient political oversight and control of the global accumulation of speculative capital is possible. If man’s social biological conditions are at such a fundamental point, that in light of this constraint the individualist liberal contract-based model seems unachievable. It can’t be a universal role model and therefore loses its unmatched global attraction. So in a realization-focused comparative perspective, on the pragmatic real-type level, the Western model should enter into competition with conceptions of other coexisting civilizations. It is possible that according to the criteria of societal improvement, other concepts, which recognize the unavoidable social entanglement of helpless-born man, perform better than our Western one. Indeed, Joanne R. Bauer and D. A. Bell insist that the fundamental purpose of the human rights regime is the promotion and protection of vital human interests, the betterment.[lxxiii]

We are now at the realization-focused level, what Sen called in Sanskrit - in opposition to the ideal arrangement-centred perspective - nyaya [lxxiv]. As we discussed elsewhere, the society is not only held together[lxxv] (a) by market contracts coming from the division of work necessary for collective self-preservation, but also (b) by the instinct to propagate the species and (c) the shared scriptural Tradition, transmitted first by the mother tongue.

In reality, the development of the helpless-born human being brings about a multigenerational social fabric that in turn leads to a system of human rights in which the family should be recognized as an important subject. Indeed, Article 23.1 of the ICCPR states that “the family is a natural and fundamental group” [lxxvi]. Today’s Western civilization insists on the individual’s right to free choice of a partner (§23.2). However, for some other contemporary civilizations the founding of a family is not exclusively a matter of two partners (for reproduction) but also of the predecessors, the whole “legating” family. Western liberals are shocked by this community based proceeding. However, if we compare globally the durability of the family institution and the stability of the families, we can observe that the bonds based essentially on instantaneous sensual sympathy, the attraction of two youths, is much more exposed to erosion over time and to divorce than alliances built on a larger socio-anthropological, multi-generational – and therefore often more multidimensional (!) – consensus.

By evoking the existence of rankings of human rights other than those of the West, we should not go too far in suggesting that the West should follow some other civilization’s norm system. We will say only that, because of the unavoidable social-anthropological embeddedness of the newborn human being in his initial position, the applied individualistic liberal model doesn’t suppress inborn social discrimination per se. It contributes only to bringing the dynastic plutocracy into an exceptional position. Therefore, from the realization-focused perspective, the Western liberal-capitalist system as historical achievement is very relative and, considering the total outcome, it remains in competition with the system of norms applied in other coexisting civilizations. The realistic reading of the alternative achievements of different human rights frees us from the Western-centred parochial bias[lxxvii].

Today, many authors state that if we will develop a truly universal system of the enumeration and ranking of fundamental human rights, we should take into consideration the “Eastern” and/or the “Asian” value order. We mention here again Daniel A. Bell who teaches now at the Chinese Tsinghua University.[lxxviii] According to him, if we consider the societal well-being indexes (among others the number of divorces, the life expectancy) of some non-Western, perhaps authoritarian societal systems, they show more compatibility with the specific characteristics of the human being and of mankind; therefore these systems could produce an even more satisfactory outcome for individuals than the strictly individualistic Western model[lxxix].

Paradoxically, if authors reduce the intercivilizational pluralism to a dichotomy between the West and a non-western amalgam called East, the approach itself becomes European-centred. It deprives precisely the particular non-western civilizations of their very identity. It is a further pitfall to speak about an “Asian” value-order as it refers to a Western, colonial-inspired geographical denomination and doesn’t encompass a homogeneous sphere of civilizations.

In general terms,[lxxx] we can state that the human rights system can be only truly universal if, along side the individualistic Western norm system, we also consider in an impartial manner the principles and practices, as well as the legacy of the Arabo-Muslim, Bharati and Chinese spheres of civilization, since they have preserved their autonomy and identity throughout a great past.

[i] Beckert J.: Inherited Wealth, Princeton UP, Princeton, 2008. Title of the original edition: Unverdientes Vermögen, Campus, Frankfurt, 2004, 29.

[ii] Already in 1792, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism in his Anarchical Fallacies Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued during the French Revolution dismisses all such claims as artificially elevated nonsense. Bentham writes: “right, the substantive right, is the child of law; from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from ‘law of nature’, come only imaginary rights.” The Works of Jeremy Bentham Williams Tait, Edinburgh, vol. II, (republished in 1843), 523.

Indeed, contrary to Sen’s argument (Sen Amartya: The Idea of Justice, Penguin Books, London, 2010, 361-4) for clarity of terminology ethical right and obligations should be clearly distinguished from substantive right enforced by law.

[iii] Onuma Yasuaki: Toward Intercivilizational Approach to Human Rights, In: Bauer J. R. and Bell A. D.: The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1999, 109-110. Y. Tyagi: Third World Response to Human Rights. In: Indian Journal of International Law 1981, 119-40.

[iv] G. Ankerl: Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INUPRESS, Geneva, 2000. HANCOCK R.C.: AMERICA, THE WEST, AND LIBERAL EDUCATION. ROWMAN@LEITTLEFIELD, LANHAM, 1999, 7-25.

[vi] About “the individual conceived as absolute”, see Adolph Wagner: Grundlegung der politischen Ökonomie. Winter’sche Verlag, Leipzig, 1894, 12. R. von Ihering: Der Zweck im Recht. Breitkopf, Leipzig, 1877. Beckert 58.

[vii] Durkheim sanctifies the individual with soul (Beckert 117). Sen (192): ..”unique dominance of single-minded pursuit of our own goals.”

[ix] For Gautama Buddha (see Sutta Nipata) humanity is enormously more powerful than other species, and - like mothers toward their children - because of this asymmetry of power we have some particular responsibilities toward them (Sen 205).

[xi] See Rawls definition of “autonomy” of “rational persons” (252). We find in game theory the “rational choice” (17). (Rawls presented his theory first in 1958 in an article.)

[xii] The extension of the marketplace-like situation on the whole social life as paradigm is expressed by Cass R. Sunstein (in her On Rumors, Penguin, London, 2010, 67): “The optimistic view – that the marketplace of ideas is essentially reliable – played a large role in the XXth century constitutional law.”

[xiii] In this context the expression habeas corpus is very often used. However, this right instituted in 1679 in the English law meant only that the arrested individual has the right to appear before the judge in person.

[xiv] Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his Common Law (1881) opposes the individual right of property to the familial and ecclesiastical rights. (John E. Welsh: Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: a New Interpretation. Lanham MD, Lexington Books, 2010.)

[xv] E. Kant: The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. V.I. Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1965, §47, 32. Rawls 11.

[xvi] In A. Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (PUF, Paris, 9.ed.,1962, 253.) Robespierre and Mirabeau don’t recognize the private property as a natural right existing before the society. (Mirabeau: “positive laws that made property possible in the first place.”) Rousseau and Montesquieu (Spirit of the Law. 1748) deduce the private property from the social contract. Hegel does the same by references to Fichte (Foundations of Natural Rights. According to the Wissenschaftslehre. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2000 [1796]). See Beckert 57, 27, 71 and 302.

[xviii] For Locke “property was a natural law that precedes all social institutions… individual right of property arises from human appropriation of nature.” The natural law justifying private property includes the inheritance. Locke exercised a predominant influence on the Fundamental Constitution of Carolinas” of 1671. (See Beckert 71, 28 and 177.)

[xix] G.Ankerl: Beyond Monopoly Capitalism and Monopoly Socialism: Distributive Justice in a Competititve Society. Schenkman, Cambridge MA, 1978, 9-16.

[xx] F. J. Turner: The Frontier in American History. H Holt, New York, 1947. S. J. McNamee and R. K. Miller: The Meritocracy Myth. Rowman, Lanham, 2009, 9. Beckert 69, 73, 126, and 71.

[xxii] In a competitive society the equality before the law is expressed by equal opportunity. (Beckert 28). We can already mention that in the U.S., for example, 17 percent of households have no fortune (only debt), and only 20 percent inherited something. It is also to observe that if somebody has a great fortune, the larger part of it came from inheritance (McNamee 59ff, 68; Beckert 28, 71, 275, 278 and 14-15.)

[xxvi] I. Brownlie: Principles of Public International Law. Oxford UP, Oxford, 2003, 531-2. M. A.Gledon: A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Random House, New York, 2001.

[xxvii] A. Sen 2. G. Ankerl: Tolerance: Variation of the Concept According to Different Civilizations. In: Democracy and Tolerance. UNESCO, Paris, 1995, 59-78.

[xxviii] B. Haarder: Beware, Broadening the Definition of Rights Can Make a Wrong. In: New York Times, 1998.11.26. Onuma Yauaki 112-113.

[xxx]Curt Goering 16-17, in D. A. Bell and J.M. Coicaud (eds.): The Ethics in Action: The Ethical Challenges of International Human Rights of Nongovernmental Organizations. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2007, 8, 13, 16-21. In the same volume see Gilmore Mertz’s article (8). Coicaud notes that today the international non-governmental organizations (INGO) are stronger ,than the trade unions.

[xxxi] C. Scott: The Interdependence and Permeability of Human Rights Norms: Toward a Partial Fusion of International Covenants on Human Rights. In: Osgood Law Journal. Vol. 27, 1989. Maurice Cranston (Are There Human Rights? In Daedalus, Fall 1983, 13) “political and civil rights are not difficult to institute. For the most part, they require..leave a man alone.” (Sen 382.) Marie-Dembour (What are Human Rights? Four Schools of Thought. In: Human Rights Quarterly February 2010, 1-20, p.2-3) wrote: For the natural school of human rights “only negative obligations can be absolute, for positive obligations (e.g., to provide education) are never as clear-cut as a simple prohibition to do something.”

[xxxiii] Louis Henkin: The International Bill of Rights. In: R. Bernhardt and Jolowicz (eds.): International Enforcement of Human Rights. North Holland Pub., New York, 1987, 6-9. According to Brownlie the obligations in the ICESCR are “programmatic and promotional” (539). The critique of the ICESCR says these rights are not accomplishable. (Onora O’Neill: Bounds of Justice. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2000.)

[xxxiv] Among the workers’ rights the trade union’s one is yet somehow watched by these organizations (ICESCR §8 and Brownie 539), since it also has a political dimension (ICCPR §22.1). It is to note that the trade unions lost in some countries their original mission. They organize the state employees who enjoy a relatively stable situation instead of the workers in the private economy. See for example in France.

[xxxv] About the institutional aspects of restoration of capitalist system see Alfio Cerami et al.: Post-Communist Welfare Pathways: Theoretician Social Policy Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave-MacMillan, New York, 2009.

[xxxvi] The I.L.O. Convention of 1964 declares in its §122.1(2) “there is work for all who are available for and seek work.” G. Ankerl: Toward a Social Contract on a World Wide Scale: Solidarity Contracts. I.L.O., Geneva, 1980.

[xxxvii] The first article states: “to accept…responsibilities for the achievement and maintenance of as high and stable employment as possible, with a view to attainment of full employment.” The second articles states: “… to protect.. the right of the worker to earn his living…”

[xxxviii] See Judith Blau (et al) volume: The Leading Rogue State: The U.S. and Human Rights. Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publ., 2009. (See also esp Brian S. Turner’s article.)

[xlii] Joy Hendry and Heung Wah Wong (eds.): Dismantling the East-West Dichotomy. Routledge, New York, 2006, G. Ankerl, 2000, 55.

[xliii] In Rawls’ theory the freedom from hunger - §11.2 of ICHSCR – isn’t the first kind of freedom. Sen 65, 47 and 85. See also Philippe Van Parijs: Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995.

[xliv] H. de Soto and Francis Cheneval (Realizing Property Rights. Ruffer and Rub, New York, 2006) write about external sphere of freedom of human being.

[xlv]The rest 12.1 percent is constituted of “cooperatives”, so-called partnerships. McNamee 68, 174-5, 166 and 180. A. S. Miller: The Modern Corporate State: Private Government and the American Constitution. Greenwood, Westport CT, 1977. W. Roy: Socializing Capital. Princeton UP, Princeton, 1997. Ch. Perrow : Organizing Amerce : Wealth, Power and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Princeton UP, Princeton, 2002.

[xlvi] David Harvey in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford UP, Oxford, 2005, 21) uses the term “juridical trick”.

[xlvii] Without contesting the absolute property right of corporations, the human rights system could obviously not be the object even of “wishful thinking”. (Samuel Mojn: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. The Belcamp Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge, 2010.)

[xlviii] F. Bastiat (Economic Harmonies. W.Hayden Poyres, 1850) stated that “in our relations with one another, we are not owners of the utility of things, but of their value, and value is the appraisal made of reciprocal services.

[xlix] It is to note that in the U.N. debate about the human rights in 1966, when the right to work arose, the neo-liberals tried to link it to the right to free international trade as a possible source to work. However, since international trade is practiced more by companies than by individuals, it is not mentioned as a human right.

[l] During the Great Depression in his speech of June 19 in 1935 President Roosevelt distinguished the defensible private property necessary for the security of individuals and families in opposition to inherited capital wealth (Beckert 189-90, McNamee 59).

[li] The 8. article of ICESCR prescribes the right to form trade unions, to strike and in an implicit manner other limitations on the use of the ownership as a means of production (Brownlie 539).

[lii] To form an opinion of the size, leverage and interconnectedness of the global banking (and also nonbanking) financial institutions, and consequently their systemic significance, we must consider that for example in Switzerland the two largest bank’s assets exceed four times the country’s G.D.P. And even in the U.S. the banks’ assets total about 82 percent of the country’s G.D.P., while eight of the ten largest banks are now - “offshore”, viz., - outside the country. (Steven M. David: Finding just-right rules for ‘ too big to fail’. In: International Herald Tribune, 16.02.2011.)

[liv]A theist, a believer in a Creator could assimilate natural fortune to social one, but Rawls (212) represents an ideological neutral position and from the viewpoint of secular justice this is unacceptable.

[lvi] L. Arrondel et al.: Bequest and Inheritance: Empirical Issues and France-U.S. Comparison. In: G. Erreygers et al. eds.: Is Inheritance Legitimate? Springer, Berlin, 1997, 89-125.

[lvii] L. Mishel et al.: The State of Working America: 2006-2007. Cornell UP, Ithaca NY, 2007, 253. H. R. Kerbo: World Poverty: Global Inequality and the Modern World System. McGraw-Hill, Boston, 2006. McNamee 59-60.

[lix] Ch. Kerwin et al.: The correlation of wealth across generations. In: Journal of Political Economy. 2003, 1155-82. McNamee 61, Beckert 15-16, 18 and 300.

[lxiii] Beckert (14): “Once legal privileges derived from birth and the heritability of offices were abolished, the inheritance of property was and is the central (!) institution of social privilege in modern societies that is based not on effort, but on birth.” Beckert goes on (300[9]: “The reason one must speak of purely social privilege is that while different degrees of intelligence and physical attractiveness also bestow advantages that are independent of effort and achievement, these are largely the result of nature.” This is a snappy retort to Rawls who refuses to make a fundamental distinction between inherited intelligence and inherited fortune. (Cf., Beckert 11, 315[41].)

[lxvii] Steve Sailer in his review – of Adam Bellow’s book (In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History. Doubleday, New York, 2003) for the National Interest (4.2003) - calls this situation “revolutionary nepotism”. The fact that Adam Bellow enjoys the advantage of his father’s literary Nobel-prize certainly helped him to become aware of the existence of advantage by birth. About the intergenerational transmission of fortune and influence in general see also Frank K. Salter’s volume (Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity. Berg Hahn Books, Oxford, 2002).

[lxxiii] In Bauer J. R. and D. A. Bell op. cit, Bell B. and D. A. state: the right regime’s “essential purpose is: to promote and protect vital human interests”. (p.3). See in ibid Onuma Yauaki, 123.

[lxxv] G. Ankerl 2000 vol. I, 53. In the Bharatiya (Hindu) philosophy we find the concept of Trivarga. The society is “cemented” by artha (mode of livelihood /production), by kama (procreative relations) and by dharma (Holy scriptural tradition). Cf., Jon Elster: The Cement of Society. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1989. (See also in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah asabiyya, social cohesion.)

[lxxvi] The group right, the “We” becomes a bearer of human rights like the “self” in individualistic human rights. Bauer and Bell 23.

[lxxvii] Sen in his quoted work underlines repeatedly the necessity to read social philosophical issues through the anthropological way, accepting the “eyes of the rest of mankind”. Adam Smith: Lectures on Jurisprudence. Liberty Press, Indianapolis IN, 1982, 104. Sen XIV, 70, 80, 127 and 404. Cf. S Moyn: The Last Utopia: Humna Rights in History. Belknap, Cambridge MA, 2010.

[lxxviii] D. A. Bell studies in his East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton UP, Princeton, 2000) the system in Singapore and in his China’s New Confucianism (Princeton UP, Princeton, 2008) the mainland Chinese one.

[lxxx] See Guy Ankerl’s already quoted Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations (149, 257, 382ff)

Bibliography :

The Relativity of Human Rights within the era of society based on contracts between equals by Guy Ankerl published in International Journal of Human Rights. London, sept. 2011, 14-36.

STAGES OF GLOBALIZATION:
PRIORITY FOR CO-OPERATION AMONG CIVILIZATION-STATES INSTEAD OF NEW-YORK-TYPE GLOBAL MIXING OF INDIVIDUALS BY MIGRATION
Abstract
DIALOGUE AMONG CIVILIZATIONS - THE KEY TO A SAFE FUTURE
(World Conference of UNESCO, 23-26 April 2003)

We are more and more in a Global Age. The ideological rhetoric of 'globalism' implicitly postulates that globalization will inevitably, and regardless of circumstances, lead to the creation of a universal civilization. In reality, the means prioritized, and the particular stages through which the process passes, cannot be looked upon indifferently, as they both have a considerable effect upon the character of the globalization achieved. - There are 2 main variants: (1)(a) The "NEW-YORK-TYPE MIXING of individuals of various civilizational origins by means of unruly migration, (b) accompanied by the boundless penetration of Western-type consumerism into all civilizational areas under Anglo-American predominance or 'leadership', or (2) a passage by (a) by enlarging and enforcing the internal bonds within living civilizations, and (b) by the constitution of CIVILIZATION-STATES, like India and China, through the assembling of smaller national states (cf. EU). A truly universal civilization is constructed on an initial basis of civilizational regionalism, within relatively autonomous geopolitical areas, which is then followed by a co-operation among equal partners based on consensus. (Reciprocal interdependence.) This mutualist approach prevents hegemonism, and among others, civil war-like conflicts within states caused by intrusive and invasive large-scale migration; and, as an end result, it produces worldwide solidarity. As Ankerl exposed in his "Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese and Western" (2000), 'civilization' signifies a genuine collective life-style, and 3 "glues" provide societal cohesion: (1) A type of livelihood, (eco-)resource management for collective self-preservation; (2) an anthropological component for race preservation (including awareness of common ancestry) and (3) a writing-system, Scripture that relates to a shared sacred heritage. Nations are mostly mother-tongue-based entities, civilizations are writing-based. (E.g., Chinese pictographic-originated, Muslim Arabic-based.) - Euro-centric continental-based divisions (cf ., 'Asia',), as well as 'Oriental' or ' Third world' civilizations are empty terms to constitute an amalgam of the whole non-West to be colonized ("The West and the Rest").
If "dialogue among civilizations is the key to a safe future" (for everybody) and only equal sovereign international actors can have true exchange (and avoid dictate), the constitution of an universal civilization needs first and foremost strong autonomous civilization-states.

In our age, the development of (a) efficient and instantaneous forms of telecommunication, and (b) the worldwide (jet air) mass transportation system increase connectedness and make globalization possible. However, the preference given to far-reaching connections and broad-spectrum mixing, and to the promotion of international exchange and 'trade'
(at the expense of national, 'vicinal', and local forms), at any price (e.g. by inexpensive export credits), is largely an ideological option. The rhetoric of the ideology of 'globalism' implicitly postulates that this process will inevitably, and regardless of circumstances, lead to the creation of a universal civilization. In reality, the means prioritized, and the particular stages through which the process passes, cannot be looked upon indifferently, as they both have a considerable effect upon the character of the globalization achieved.

A./ (a) The "NEW-YORK-TYPE MIXING of individuals of various civilizational origins by means of unruly migration, (b) accompanied by the boundless penetration of Western-type (fancy) consumerism into all civilizational areas under Anglo-American predominance or 'leadership'; or

B./ A passage by other stages: first at all, (a) by enlarging, enforcing and intensifying the internal bonds within living civilizations, and (b) - by following the example of presently existing CIVILIZATION-STATES
such as India and China - by the constitution of new civilization-states, such as the European Union, through the assembling of smaller national states. Put briefly, a truly global civilization is constructed on an initial basis of civilizational regionalism, within relatively autonomous geopolitical areas, which is then followed by the promotion of co-operation between these groups.

This second way contains two fundamental promises: avoiding chaotic, civil war-like conflicts within states caused by intrusive and invasive large-scale migration; and, as an end result, worldwide solidarity within the framework of a truly universal civilization, brought about by co-operation among civilizations on the basis of reciprocal interdependence. This mutualist approach to globalization is already prefigured in the five principles ( "panca sila" ) of co-operation outlined in the Declaration of the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Countries in 1955.

CIVILIZATION signifies a genuine collective lifestyle, sustained by an encompassing and sufficiently large population which, by extension, occupies a sufficiently large (resource-rich) area (Ankerl 2000, 28).

Each civilization has three vectors that serve as 'glues' to provide societal cohesion:

1. A type of livelihood (also summarily called 'mode of production'). This signifies collaborative (eco-)resource management for collective self-preservation (including class solidarity with regard to income distribution);

2. The anthropological component includes the awareness of a common ancestry beyond genealogical (lineal and affinal) kinship for race preservation.

3. The third 'glue', by no means the least important, is a Scripture that relates to a shared sacred heritage. Despite being one of the most tangible characteristics of a civilization, this element is frequently neglected by Western science, due to the more or less phonetic nature of all Western writing systems. Indeed, while nations are mostly mother-tongue-based entities, civilizations are writing-based.

The Chinese civilization, for instance, is fundamentally shaped by the Confucian ideograms. New concepts are transcribed into the pictographic-originated scripture, which thus assures China's continuity in time and space. The Brahmi-Devangari writing is the medium of the Veda, the shared tradition of all Hindus, while for the whole 'constituency' of the Muslim civilization, the Koran's Arabic writing is an essential relying base. (Many writing systems in non-Arabic Muslim countries originally derive from Arabic.)

This being granted, the importance of each of the three vectors varies between different civilizations, and each civilization establishes a different cardinal institution (economy, religion, family, ethnicity, etc.).

Our present Western civilization is fundamentally a business civilization that establishes an econocratic society. (In Old English, bisinesse was opposed to 'art'.) In this ideological system, 'progress', 'modernization', 'rationalization', and other key terms become defined and measured by profit-oriented calculation. Business-type, short-term reasoning becomes the norm. Its science of 'universal history' interprets longum et latum the ultimate cause of any historical event by historical economism. This statement is valid for both liberalism and the post-Ricardoian Marxist school. The West also applies sciences to its colonization of the world. In this perspective, all contemporary, geographically co-existing civilizations are arranged in temporal order and, as a result, all non-Western ones appear as archaic and behind the times.

Yet how can we conceive of different co-existing civilizations if all human values are universal? Human values may indeed be universal; however, they do not perforce exist in harmony together. It is therefore necessary - in the case of conflicting obligations - to rank them, and each civilization arranges (subordinates) values and institutions differently, according to its principles.

Living civilizations cover geopolitical areas. This should not be confused with the CONTINENTAL division of the globe, such as Europe or Asia, particularly as these divisions and denominations are noticeably Eurocentric and do not have a firm foundation in physical geography. Why should India be a 'subcontinent', and why is Europe a 'continent' and not a subcontinent of Eurasia? (The calculation and comparison, for instance, of an 'Asian average' or a 'European average' consequently become scientifically meaningless operations.)

The most important point for us is that the existing continental divisions are not substantiated divisions in terms of civilization. For geopolitics, as well as for human geography, only the civilizational division of geographical areas is relevant, such as the Chinese, Bharati, Arabo-Muslim, Western and Sub-Saharan civilizations.

As a matter of fact, the concept of 'Asian civilization' is misleading; so too is 'ORIENTAL' or even 'Third World' civilization. Not one of them is a scientific concept with heuristic value. They are confusing empty boxes, Euro-colonial amalgams. Their true content is negative, namely, that of a NON-WESTERN mass, passively awaiting colonization by 'Promethean Western business'. Edward Said, Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, of Christian Arab Palestinian origin, made a pioneering work that demonstrates how Orientalism
is a tendentious science. However, by seeking the true content of the Orient, he misses the essential point, namely the fact that an 'oriental civilization' is itself a false, non-operating concept. In contrast, the Indian-Singaporean Ambassador to the U.N., Kishore Mahbubani's formulation of "the West and the Rest" suitably expresses the purely negative nature of the concept 'Orient'.

Through independent and impartial observation, it becomes clear that the differences between the Chinese and the Arabo-Muslim civilizations - both frequently labelled as "oriental" by the West - are as significant as their respective differences to the Western civilization. Are there indeed any characteristics common to the so-called oriental civilizations, beyond a comfortable colonizing prejudice? (For that matter, when the Chinese pilgrim, Xijou Ji, traveled to India, he called his trip, "Voyage en Occident".) Incidentally, the term 'Third-World civilization' shares the same negative connotation as the aforementioned binary distinction. It suggests that the non-Western world is little more than a civilization of misery. Taken together, these binary conceptualizations of the West fulfill one sole function: to conceal and to obliterate the identity of all living civilizations other than the Western one.

The WESTERN civilization presents itself as a model for an eventual universal civilization. Its ambitions are hegemonic. As set out in our "Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations" (pp.50-245), it is composed of several relatively coherent forces that operate together: (a) The Anglo-Saxon grouping includes Anglo-America and the 'white' Commonwealth. Presently, its predominance and its cohesion are visible on the international scene. Against all its pretensions, we cannot admit that the English language, spoken by less than 10 % of the world's population, is the bearer of a universal civilization, as many publications on globalization would imply. While English is the most important international language, it is not a global language. (b) The populous Latin Catholic periphery is another important cultural and ethnic component of the Western civilization. (c) Over recent decades, the Jewish people have become an increasingly autonomous cultural, economic and political influence in the Western world, despite its large majority living in Diaspora.

For any civilization, by virtue of its yearning for permanence and an autonomous internal order that mirrors its value system, statehood constitutes an important historical landmark. In the globalization process, statehood has a particular system-value regarding the self-expression of each civilization. The EUROPEAN part of the Western civilization seeks a united statehood. The European Union has been in formation for a half century. So far, the steps toward unification have been largely based on the econocratic ideology prevailing in the West, namely, beginning the whole process with a 'common market' and following it up with a common currency. For the constitution of a federal or confederal state, its organs appear to look to the United States of America for inspiration. Other civilizations, however, such as the Chinese and the Bharati or Indian civilizations, have already constructed their civilization-states. Moreover, the human geography of Europe has far more in common with India than with the United States of America. Europe is composed of peoples with diverse linguistic and ethnic traditions, settled geographically in different countries. This is the case in the Republic of India, which is composed of (pra)deshes or 'homelands'. The states in the U.S.A. do not possess this societal signification. The Anglo-American U.S. is composed mainly of immigrants of various origin, widely dispersed across its entire territory, with some reserves for the indigenous Indian populations. One language, English, is clearly predominant. It is becoming the sole (quasi-)official language. The constitution of a united European state would therefore provide an opportunity to reverse the customary (uni-)directional tendency of the international learning process. The constitution of India could serve for such a model.

The differences of value and institutional order that exist between various contemporary living civilizations in no way necessitate a clash between them. Only the aggressive economic, cultural(-mediatic), and political(-military) penetration of the Western civilization into other (particularly Arabo-Muslim) civilizational areas can. indeed result in clashes. In this sense, Samuel Huntington's seminal book (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, 1998) is more an invitation and an agenda for Western imperial penetration into other - chiefly Arabo-Muslim - civilizational areas, than it is a historical description of the contemporary world situation. Salim Rashid's volume demonstrates this viewpoint clearly, among others, and recent events in the Middle East confirm this evaluation. However, the originality of each living civilization requires that the eventual construction of a universal civilization be brought about through dialogue and consensus building.

On the other hand, effective and fertile dialogue among civilizations on equal footing is only possible between partners who consider each other as equals. Again, recent events in the Middle East have demonstrated that only politically balanced power relations can provide such a ground and serve as a counterbalance to Anglo-American transnational econocracy. In this perspective, the next step towards globalization should be the reinforcement of currently existing civilization-states such as India and China, as well as the constitution of new ones, such as the European Union. The authentic political representation of the Arab-Muslim civilization in this international dialogue is a particularly timely and salient issue. It cannot be done by dividing the Muslim world and replacing the dialogue with the Organization of the State of Islamic Conference with "multiple unilateralism" (Hubert Verdine) involving individually weak and intimidated Arab, or other, Muslim states.

In this phase of globalization, the installation and perpetuation of Western econocratic world hegemony by means of the unilateral diffusion of Western merchandise and merchandized mass media products, as well as by the migration of individuals from various civilizational background as cheap manpower, are unproductive for the construction of a universally accepted world civilization. Such actions can additionally create chaotic socio-political conditions, awkward problems (e.g. in Canada, where the most important immigrant population now has Chinese as its mother tongue and writing system), the decomposition of families, and individual alienation. The promotion of such historical processes could produce a hotbed for both xenophobia and supremacism. The massive penetration of alien populations can engender feelings of invasion and generate xenophobia. (Furthermore, democratization is not necessarily a solution for deeply divided societies; the mechanic application of 'democratic' majoritarianism can lead to a dictatorship by fixed majority blocks.) In this context, xenophobia should not be confused with racism; xenophobia can be attributed simply to situations, whereas racism involves peoples' inherent, constitutive, and substantive characteristics. By crossing a border, a person can nullify his state as a 'foreigner', but he cannot change his race in this way. Racism, on the other hand, is a form of supremacism, and supremacism, as a prejudicial ideology, can be based not only on race but also on religion, oligarchic heritage, etc. Again, the assertion of existing anthropological group differences itself refers to the scientific field and issue of genetics, and should therefore not be equated simply with racism.

If a dialogue among civilizations is the key to a safe future", we should consider this dialogue not only in terms of an academic dialogue, but also as an exchange among actors in international politics. However, a civilizational dialogue among international actors can only occur when each actor recognizes the equal sovereign might of his partners. Thus the constitution of a number of strong, independent civilization-states is a condition for this dialogue and the key to a safe future for all peoples and states, be they Western or Arabic or other; it is the key to mutual international security based on world-wide consent and not on dictate.

'Trade' refers to the increasing number of financial transactions - such as cosmopolitan transnational and multinational capital exports - operating on the basis of symbols instead of on natural or transformed raw materials.

Ankerl, G.: Global Communication Without Universal Civilization. Vol. I: Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. Geneva, 2000, 530 p. ISBN 2-88155-004-5, p. 28.

Comte, A.: Bandoung, tournant de l'histoire. Paris, 1965. Jouve, E.: Le Tiers Monde. Paris, 1990.

A parallel can be drawn between these and the Trivarga: Dharma (adherence to the (pre)Scripture); Kama (race-preservation through love); and Artha (self-preservation through economic and ecological activity).

The Sikh's religion, for example, is related to Gurmuki writing, Buddhism to Prakrit, the natural Pali, Western Chiristian to Latin, and Orthodox to Cyrillic.

Western sciences, which constitute a basis of our axiomatic belief system, are related to their own particular writing system. E.g., chemistry.

Pirenne, H.: Grands Courants de l'Histoire Universelle. Paris, 1945-56. Sanderson, K. S.
(ed.): Civilizations and World System: Studying World-Historical Change. Walnut Creek,
Calif. 1995,

Ankerl, G.: Tolerance. Variation of the concept according to different civilizations. In: Democracy and Tolerance. Paris-Seoul: UNESCO, 1995, pp. 59-78.

Said, E.: Orientalism. New York, 1978. Said, E.: Culture and Imperialism. New York, 1993. Carrier, J. G. (ed.): Occindentalism. Oxford, 1995, p.4.

Oommen, T.K.: Ethnicity, Immigration, and Cultural Pluralism: India and the USA. In: Kohn, M. L. (ed): Cross-Cultural Research in Sociology. Newbury Park, Calif. 1989, p. 291

S. Huntington's well-publicized theses are simple tools for substantiating Western rule in our time. Indeed, his enumeration (and description) of living civilizations is scientifically unfounded, and the historical necessity of a clash between them remains undemonstrated. See especially Salim Rashid (ed.)'s 'Clash of Civilizations?' Asian Response (Dhaka, 1997), Abul Kalam's chapter, 'Huntingtion and the World Order: Systematic Concern or Hegemonic Vision?' (839-64 pp.), Amit Gupta, 'The Clash of Militarized Civilizations?' (65-74 pp.), and Ankerl, G., op cit 2000, pp.133, 153, 174-5, 250-1, 274, 290, 308, 316, 360-2, 386, 428, 433, 452, 460, and 470.

Keat, Russell: Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market: Beyond Commercial Modelling. New York, 2001.

Udell, J.: Toward Conceptual Codification in Race and Ethnic Relations. New York, 1979,
pp.25ff.

So they are all a single people with a single language!
said Yahweh. This is but the start of their undertaking!..
It was named Babel therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth."

"If English is ever adopted as the international language,
it will not be on account of its perfection as an
instrument, but for economic, political, and cultural reasons."

A. L. Guérard: Short History of the International
Language Movement. New York, pp. 40, 45

Communication is the real substratum of all social relations, and language is specific to human communication. Every human being as a "symbol-using animal" has at least a mother tongue which is an objective criterion for his membership in a speech community. The (primary) verbal linguistic competence acquired in an intimate family setting as the mother tongue plays - beyond its pragmatic function of communication - a fundamental role for the individual's first world-view, general cognitive categorization, social orientation and for his integration into his community's cultural heritage. It remains a primary building block of his personal identity during his whole life. Being a people's mother tongue is also the guarantee for a language as such to being neither dead (as Latin is) nor Utopian (as Esperanto and Volapük are) but to be living.

In societies with script the "scholastically" learned writing is already a deliberate intellectual integration in a wider (literate) social and historical entity (perhaps an empire) which relates the individual to what we call a civilization with shared scripture - Bible, Koran, Buddhist or Confucian writings. On this level of education the individual might already encounter other languages with which his mother tongue shares - or not - one and the same writing system (e.g. Roman, Arabic alphabets, Chinese morphemic writing, picto-, ideo-, logograms).

On this level of formal scholarly assimilation of "writing and reading" the language appears as a supplementary burden on people, possibly with a net disadvantage, for whom this step necessarily means the learning of a second language.

As far as the second language is concerned, it implies a deliberate passage of communication between cultures. By historical and geo-political circumstances this easing of intercultural compenetration could be (1) reciprocal or (2) one-sided, implying some hierarchization. In the first case the relation between contact languages could be symbiotic, while in the second accommodative - or even assimilative. Second language learning in the Helvetic Confederation, for example, is a mutual process, while the learning of Spanish by Indian immigrants in Ibero-American cities or that of English by Hispanic immigrants in the USA are examples of the second case. (See the exclusivist official English Language Movement in the American States as reborn nativism.) The latter is a matter of linguistic expansion which enlarges the cultural influence of one speech community, while it imposes on the others a multi-layer identity (and eventually a new enculturation) as the price for intercultural communication and understanding, and in the extreme maybe an alienation or acculturation. Depending on the lexical, structural, syntactical and scriptural proximity of a mother tongue as the "source" language to that of the learned second language indicates the cost of this integration into a wider, eventually global civilizational entity. Indeed, the construction of a globalistic world order requires a thorough transnational linguistic understanding.

Presently the development of multiform (mostly electronic) instantaneous telecommunication - largely thanks to ubiquitous computing - and partly that of the supersonic intercontinental mass transport generated an intensive globalization process, even if as yet it touched - esp. beyond the mass media such as radio and TV - unequally (and only a small proportion of) the world population. This fact and especially Internet generated a powerful tendency to use English - as well as the Roman writing pattern - in many alleys of international relations in exclusivity. The English language also penetrated the everyday life of many societies (esp. those with similar roots) with its idioms and "cultural configurations", - even if the reflection of a culture in each specific language is relative and not uniform.

We can empirically gauge the size, speed and the mechanisms of the implicit and explicit imposition of English (Crawford) by many ways and methods such as the number of anglicisms as neologisms, borrowed words, loan translations in newspapers, - and even deep interference of plain linguistic techniques (not only by phonetic and morphemic structural elements but by paradigmatic and syntactic features) - as well as by the statistics of the choice in second language learning.

The global and local - political and cultural - impact of these tendencies is a subject for timely studies.

Even if in our scientifically advanced epoch all of the world's languages have not yet been investigated by Western scholars, accumulating knowledge of facts and their effect on linguistic interaction helps us not only to comprehend the phenomenon but to prevent impending tensions due to loss of identity and the feeling of collective alienations as well as to reestablish equilibria in the coexistence of languages based on frank linguistic cooperation. The open, explicit discussion of the subject itself will smooth out the uneasiness felt about the world hegemony of one of the living languages due to "designatio unius est exclusio alterius".

Mother tongue as a first basic building block of cultural (and social) identification.

L'Institut Interuniversitaire (INU) a pour but de créer, d'appliquer et de diffuser des connaissances exactes en sciences humaines basées sur une conception universelle de la science. L'Institut exerce ses activités dans une perspective multicontinentale et polyglotte sans l'interférence d'idéologies, de préjugés ou d'autres considérations extra-scientifiques.

L'INU s'efforce de mettre au service de la communauté les découvertes des sciences humaines, tout en se référant aux acquis d'autres disciplines scientifiques.

Pour atteindre son but, l'INU s'engage à remplir une fonction critique et une fonction créatrice.

Par l'analyse des prémisses, des postulats et concepts fondamentaux des théories scientifiques, l'INU contribue à l'élimination de toute considération implicitement ou explicitement extrinsèque aux raisonnements scientifiques, sans s'arrêter aux intérêts personnels. Il est affranchi de la tutelle de tout argument d'autorité émanant du pouvoir politique, de la puissance économique, du monopole d'information, du privilège acquis ou statutaire, académique ou de naissance.

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En conformité avec ses intérêts scientifiques et son opinion déontologique, il est, d'une manière générale, de la compétence de l'INU de soumettre à un examen critique l'exactitude des faits établis. L'INU révèle les abus de la sémantique et l'inexactitude des informations qui déforment la réalité sociale, en tant que données sociologiques, dans la pratique quotidienne de la vie publique.

Fondé sur la connaissance positive, l'Institut se propose de faire des recherches selon des critères épistémologiques les plus stricts.

Considérant l'état actuel des sciences humaines et leur situation dans la communauté scientifique, l'INU leur attribue un statut dévolu aux sciences exactes et expérimentales. Pour se garder de maintenir la distinction entre 'hard science' et 'soft science', l'INU favorise plutôt la recherche dans les domaines des sciences humaines où méthodes et paradigmes, permettant des formulations exactes, une conceptualisation en termes opérationnels et une vérification inductive, peuvent être développés. (Par exemple, recherche sur la communication, l'échange et autres domaines du comportement spatio-temporel).

Bien que l'INU mette l'accent sur la rigueur dans la recherche sociale, il ne perd pas de vue qu'une destination primordiale de la connaissance est d'éclairer les aspirations humaines - que ce soit au plan individuel, collectif ou social - et de contribuer à leur épanouissement. Bien au contraire, grâce à son orientation objectiviste et à sa préférence pour une stratégie de recherche basée sur l'expérimentation, l'INU renforce la validité interne des résultats obtenus et prépare ainsi le terrain pour une action relevante et responsable.

De plus, l'utilisation des résultats de la recherche expérimentale, pour résoudre des problèmes concrets, permet d'évaluer le pouvoir prévisionnel de la science et donne de nouvelles impulsions aux recherches futures.

L'INU recourt à la coopération interdisciplinaire et multinatio-nale afin d'établir des expertises pour des organisations publiques et privées, de conseiller des particuliers et ainsi de résoudre des problèmes techniques, politiques ou cliniques. Pour que ces recommandations soient pleinement utiles, l'Institut se réfère au système de valeurs exprimé par les responsables de décision ( decisionmakers), sans toutefois le partager nécessairement. Cependant, les systèmes de valeurs ne se situent pas hors de toute investigation scientifique. Outre que l'INU applique la science de la décision et assiste les responsables de décision dans la reformulation de leurs problèmes pratiques en une problématique scientifique, il développe aussi les catégories de la 'science privée' qui permettent de restructurer ces systèmes de valeurs en termes explicites.

L'INU est ouvert aux suggestions et aux arguments de groupes ou d'individus ayant été socialisés dans diverses cultures, sans considération hiérarchique. Il encourage, anime, aide et coordonne les chercheurs individuels et les groupes de recherche qui souscrivent à des normes épistémologiques rigoureuses. Conformément à ses objectifs, l'INU diffuse les hypothèses vérifiables et les résultats de recherche vérifiés par des publications et par l'emploi d'autres média - télétransmission, diffusion et communication - pour autant que ces techniques permettent d'acheminer des connaissances scientifiques et non des réflexions indisciplinées, même sous une forme esthétiquement très séduisante. L'action de l'INU est fondamentalement orientée vers la probité scientifique.

Par cet ouvrage très fouillé, l'auteur exerce une critique fondamentale sur l'approche bipolaire pratiquée en politique et en sciences sociales par l'Occident.

En effet, l'Occident "civilisé"doit accepter qu'il y a non seulement plusieurs civilisations anciennes, mais qu'il est appelé à coexister avec plusieurs civilisations présentes.

Le premier volume intitulé Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations identifie les civilisations arabo-musulmane, chinoise, indienne et occidentale selon leurs constituants anthropologique, matériel et scriptural. Au-delà de la civilisation de business occidentale actuelle, ces trois constitutants sont différemment hiérarchisés selon les civilisations. Cet ordre de subordination engendre un ordre de valeurs spécifique; par conséquent les différentes civilisations présentent une institution axiale distincte.

L'ouvrage traite l'interaction du noyau anglo-américain avec la périphérie catholique latine et la Diaspora au sein du monde occidental. Il différencie aussi clairement l'Occident de la civilisation-Etat chinoise, de la civilisation-Etat indienne et des pays de civilisation arabo-musulmane réunis dans l' Organisation de la Conférence Islamique.

Avec la tendance occidentale à adhérer au globalisme, représenté par l'échantillon culturel du melting pot new-yorkais, l'auteur considère le modèle brésilien comme étant très efficace pour l'intégration de complexes de civilisation africains.

La partie conclusive du premier volume du Global communication without universal civilization introduit le lecteur dans le sujet du deuxième volume. En effet, l'auteur s'efforce de réfuter la formule manichéenne occidentale qui divise le mondeen catégories est-ouest, sud-nord et, plus précisemment, ouest et non-ouest. Il vise ainsi à remplacer le dialogue entre l'ouest et le tiers monde par une table ronde des civilisations vivantes. Le deuxième volume va traiter le passage du dialogue actuel nord-sud, d'ores et déjà discrédité, au dialogue global plus authentique basé sur le pluralisme des civilisations.

- Dirk Pereboom: Logique et Logistique. Une Initiation. Deuxième édition élargie. Collection Méthodes. ISBN 28781550029. 38 CHF.

Apprentissage pratique des bases de la logique et de la logistique, en 233 pages assorties de nombreux exercices et leur solution.

-Théopiste Butare: Secteurs Traditionnel et Moderne dans le Processus de Développement.INU Societal Research Series. ISBN 2881550037. 42 CHF.

- Guy Ankerl: Urbanization Overspeed in Tropical Africa. INU Societal Research Series. ISBN 2881550002. 20 CHF.

Traduction de l'Urbanisation Rapide en Afrique Tropicale. Paris, Berger-Levrault. Paris. ISBN 2701306736.

Das Interuniversitäre Institut (INU) fördert wissenschaftliche Forschung nach einem universalen Wissenschaftskonzept, d.h. ohne sich zu Lehrmeinungen bestimmter nationalen Schulen oder besonderer Ideologien zu bekennen. Sein Character ist multikontinental und multizivilisatorsch. Weiterhin verbreitet en exakte humanwissenschaftliche Kenntnisse und wendet sie an.

In seinem Bestreben, der menschlichen Gesellschaft durch Anwendung wissenschaftlicher Forschungergebnisse zu dienen, konzentriert das INU sich auf die Humanwissenschaften, aber - wenn nötig - verwendet es auch Beiträge anderer Wissenschaften.

Durch die Analyse des Prämissen, Postulate und Zentralbegriffe wissenschaflicher Theorien, sucht das INU alle Argumente, die implizit oder explozit einer wissenschaftlichen Beweisführung fremd sind, zu identifizieren und auszuschliessen. Diesen Aufgabe widmet sich das Institut ohne Rücksicht auf Personen oder persönliche Interessen. Das INU hält sich frei von der Vormundschaft autoritätsgläubiger Argumentation, die von politischen Instanzen, wirtschaftlichen Verbänden, Informationsmonopolen, akademischen Institutionen oder persönlicher Einflussnahmen ausgeht.

Im Bereich der Wissenschaft setzt sich das INU mit jener Sophistik auseinander, die mit im Grunde nur rhetorischen Mitteln produktive Forschung behindert. Zu diesem Zweck entwickelt das INU Methoden der Epistemologie und der Wissenschaftssoziologie und wendet sie entsprechend an. Es fördert Veröffentlichungen ausschliesslich um ihres wissenschaftlichen Wertes willen. Das iNU hält anonyme Veröffentlichungen - wie z.B. von Bourbaki - für ein geeignetes Mittel, die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung und Porduktivität auf ihr eigentliches Anliegen zurückzubringen, da Anonymität eine personenbezogene Argumentation und das Überhandnehmen von Veröffentlichungen verhindert, die vor allem der persönlichen Eitelkeit dienen sollen.

Zu den Verpflichtungen des INU gehört weiterhin, die Exaktheit festgestellter Tatsachen kritisch zu überprüfen. Im Interesse der Alltagpraxis des öffentlichen Lebens stellt das INU semantischen Missbrauchen und ungenaue Informationen bloss, die Daten der sozialen Wirklichkeit entstellen.

Das Institut führt Forschungen nach stregen wissenschaftlichen Standards durch.

Ausgehend vom gegenewärtigen Stand der Humanwissenschaften im allgemeinen und ihrer Stellung in der Wissenschaft im besonderen, beansprucht das INU für sie denselben Rang, den andere, exakten und experimentellen Wissenschaften haben. Statt die Teilung zwischen 'hard science' und 'soft science' fortzuführen, fördert das INU Forschung auf jenen Gebieten der Humanwissenschaften, in denen Methoden und Paradigmen entwickelt werden können, die exakte Formulierung, operationalisierbare Begriffsbildung und indiuktive Beweisführung als Verifikation ermöglichen (z.B. Forschung auf den Gebieten der Kommunikation und anderes raum-zeit-lichen Verhaltens).

Indem das INU auf strengen wissenschaftlichen Standards besteht, sieht sich das INU nicht behindert, die gesellschaftlichen Auf-gabe der Erkenntnis zu berècksichtingen, menschliches Strebens - persönlicher, kollektiver oder sozialer Art - aufzuklären und in seiner Entfaltung zu fördern. Gerade indem das INU auf seiner objektivistischen und experimentellen Forschungsstrategie besthet, erhöht es die interne Gültigkeit seiner Forschungsergebnisse und schafft so die Voraussetzung für relevantes und verantwortliches Handeln. Ferner trägt die Anwendung experimentell kontrollierter Forschungsergebnisse bei der Lösung konkreter Probleme auch zur Überprüfung der Voraussagekraft der Wissenschaft bei und gibt damit künftiger Forschung neue Impulse.

Öffentliche und private Organisationen wie Einzelpersonen werden vom INU sachverständig auf der Grundlage interdisziplinärer und transnationaler Zusammenarbeit zur Lösung technischer, politi-scher und klinischer Probleme beraten. Um die praktische Brauchbarkeit seiner Empfählungen zu sichern, bezieht sich das INU letztlich auf das Präferenzsystem derer, die die Entscheidungen treffen, auch wenn es diese Präferenz nicht teilt. Diese Präfe-renzsysteme selbst liegen jedoch nicht völlig ausserhalb jeglicher wissenschaftlicher Überprüfung.

Das INU nutzt nicht nur die Entscheidungswissenschaft und hilft den Entscheidenen dabei, ihre Fragen in wissenschaftlich anwendbare Begriffe umzuformulieren, sondern es kann auch Kategorien für eine als Privatwissenschaft zu bezeichnende wissenschaftliche Disziplin anbieten, um das Präferenzsystem explizit rekonstruierbar zu machen.

Das INU ist offen für Vorschläge und Argumente von Individuen und Gruppen verschiedener kultureller Herkunft und unabhängig von hierarchisachen Erwägungen. Es ermutigt, fördert und koordiniert die wissenschaftliche Arbeit von Individuen und Gruppen nach strengen epistemologischen Kriterien. Im Einklang mit seinen Zielsetzungen verarbeitet das INU verifizierbare Indeen in seinen eigenen Veröffentlichungen und durch andere Medien der Fernübertragung, Diffusion und Kommunikation, insofern diese Techniken geeignet sind, wissenschaftliche Kenntnisse zu vermitteln, und nicht als Übermittler disziplinloser Spekulationen dient, auch wenn diese in ästitisch ansprechneder Form geboten wird. Das INU lässt sich von keinen anderen Werten leiten als denen der wissenschaftlichen Zuverlässigkeit.

El Instituto Interuniversitario (INU) tiene como fin crear, aplicar y difundir conocimientos exactos en ciencias humanas basadas en una concepción universal de la cienca. El Instituto ejerce sus actividades con una perspectiva multicontinental y políglota sin interferencias ideológicas, prejuicios u otras consideraciones extra-científicas.

El INU se esfuerza en poner al servicio de la comunidad los descubrimientos de las ciencias humanas, refiriendose siempre a lo adquirido en otras disciplinas cientificas.

Para alcanzar su fin, el INU se compromete a desempenar une función crítica y une función creadora.

Por análisis de las premisas, de los postulados y conceptos fundamentales de la teorias cientificas, el INU contribuye a la eliminación de toda consideración implícamente o explícamente extrinseca a los razonamientos cientificis, sin pararse en los intereses personales. Está exento de la tutela de todo argumento de autoridad que emane del poder poltico, de la potencia económica, del monopolio de informacíón, del privilegio adquirido o estatuario, academico o de nacimiento.

En el seno mismo de la comunidad académica, el INU se aplica en combatir el sofisma que, por su retórica implícita, obstaculiza la investigación creadora. Con este fin, desarrolla y aplica métodos de la epistemologia y de la sociologia del conocimiento científico. Apoya igualmente las publicaciones anónimas, del tipo Bourbaki, como un medio apropiado para conduir el debate y la creación cientificos, a su verdadero campo, ya que el anonimato dificulta toda argumentación ad hominem y elemina la proliferación de publicaciones vanas.

Conformemente con sus intereses científicos y su opinión deontológica, es de manera general, competencia del INU el someter a examen crítico la exactitud de los hechos establecidos. El INU revela los abusos de la semantica y la inexactitud de las informaciones que deforman la realidad social, como datos sociológicos, en la practica cotidiana de la vida publica.

Fundado en el conocimiento positivo, el Instituto se propone hacer investigaciones según los criterios epistemológicos más estrictos.

Considerando el etado actual de las ciencias humanas y de su situación en la comunidad científica, el INU les atribuye un estatuto tan exigente como es el estatuto correspondido en dereche a las ciencias exactas y experimentales. Para poder manener la distinción entre 'hard ciencia' and 'soft ciencia', el INU favorece más las investigaciones en el campo de ciencias humanas, donde métodos y paradigmas, permiten formulaciones exactas, una conceptualización en términos operacionles y una verificación inductiva, pueden asi desarrollarse. (Por ejemplo, investigación sobre la communicación, el intercambio y otros campos del comportamiento espacio-temporal.)

Aunque el INU marca el acento sobre el rigor en la investigación social, no pierde de vista que un destino primordial del conocimiento es aclarar las aspiraciones humanas - sea en el plano individual, colectivo o social - y contribuir a su realización. Por el contrario, gracias a su orientación objectivista y a su preferencia por una estrategia de investigación basada en la experimentación, el INU refuerza la validez interna de los resultados obtenidos y prepara asi el terreno para una acción de realce y responsable.

Además, la untilización de los resultados de la investigación experimental, para resolver problemas concretos, permite evaluar el poder previsional de la ciencia y de nuevos impulsos a las investigaciones futuras.

El INU recurre a la cooperación interdisciplinaria y multinational afin de establecer peritajes para organismos públicos y privados, de aconsejar a los particulares y resolver asi problemas tecnicos, politicos o clinicos. Para que estas recomendaciones sean plenamente útiles, el Insituto se refiere al sistema de valores expresado por los responsables de decisión (decisionmakers), sin por ello compartirlos necesariamente. Sinembargo, los sistemas de valores no se situan fuera de toda investigación científica.

Además de que le INU aplica la ciencia de la decisión y asiste a los responsables de decisión en la reformulación de sus problemas practicos en una probelmatica cientifca, desarrolla tambien categorías de la "ciencia privada que permiten estructurar estos sistemas de valores en términos explícitos.

El INU esta abierto a sugestiones y argumentos de grupos o individuos socializados en diversas culturas, sin consideración jerárquica. Sostiene, anima, ayuda y coordina a los investigadores individuales y a los grupos de investigación que sus-criben a normas epistemológicas rigurosas. De acuerdo con sus objectivos el INU difunde hipótesis verificables y los resultados de investigación verificados por publicaciones, y por el empleo de otros media - teletransmisión, difusión y comunicación - siempre y cuando estas técnicas permitan canalizar conocimientos científicos no reflexiones indisciplinades aunque sea en forma estéticamente seductora. La acción del INU esta fundamentalmente orientada hacia la probidad científica.

INSTITUT INTERUNIVERSITAIRE

Genève

Interuniversity Institute

CH-1211 Genève-11, case 5044
Phone/fax: 41+22+7341718
e-mail: INU@INUGE.CH

INU

Architects’ Journal, 1982

Beyond Monopoly Capitalism and Monopoly Socialism: Distributive Justice in a Competitive Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978. 117 pp. (Paper ed. 1979).

ARTICLES

LIVRES

Moscovici, Serge etc.: The Invention of Society : Psychological Explanations for Social Phenomena. 1999

Contemporary Sociology, 1977

ARTICLES

[lxv] Cf., R. Dawkins: The Selfish Gene. Oxford UP, Oxford, 1976. Roland P. Sokol: Justice after Darwin. Michie Co, Charlottesville VA, 1975.

INSTITUT INTERUNIVERSITAIRE

Genève

Interuniversity Institute

CH-1211 Genève-11, case 5044 Phone/fax: 41+22+7341718 e-mail: INU@INUGE.CH

INU

Architects’ Journal, 1982

Beyond Monopoly Capitalism and Monopoly Socialism: Distributive Justice in a Competitive Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978. 117 pp. (Paper ed. 1979).

ARTICLES

LIVRES

Moscovici, Serge etc.: The Invention of Society : Psychological Explanations for Social Phenomena. 1999

Contemporary Sociology, 1977

ARTICLES

[lxv] Cf., R. Dawkins: The Selfish Gene. Oxford UP, Oxford, 1976. Roland P. Sokol: Justice after Darwin. Michie Co, Charlottesville VA, 1975.

CH-1211 Genève-11, case 5044
Phone/fax: 41+22+7341718
e-mail: INU@INUGE.CH