The Genetic Fallacy and the Politics of Rights

Genealogical understanding of the way in which the concept of right gets established is not a way of showing that right's discourse is somehow incoherent. The history there doesn't refute anything. It shifts the question from what is the justification for an absolute theory of rights to the question: Why? What connection might there be between those rights and particular institutions? We've talked about some of the thinkers in the history of political thought who have perhaps gone too far down the route of trying to understand the human being in abstraction. Which are the thinkers that you would say are in the tradition that will contextualize the individual sufficiently to ask the right questions? Hegel, Marx, Max Weber, Foucault