THE HIDDEN HARMONY. FROM RIGHTS TO DUTIES

To justify extensive socio-normative structures, from colonialism to the peace of peoples, from cosmopolitanism to global justice, Europeans have used the theory that ideas that can be known through reason are universal. Particularly it has benefited from the Kantian idea that knowledge that comes from the rational concept is simply the logical condition of exiting from a state of minority, a process that the philosopher of Konigsberg calls Enlightenment. Nothing seems more universal and nothing less alien to the European tradition then the idea that Western values are so universalizable that they can be translated into rights