Oltre la retorica dei diritti umani. Genealogia storica ed effettività tra promessa emancipativa e rischio di neutralizzazione

This contribution offers a historical and legal analysis of human and fundamental rights genealogy, critically questioning their effectiveness in the contemporary constitutional state. Starting from the tradition of legal limits and modern constitutionalism, the work reconstructs the rights affirmation as a technique for containing power and highlights its ambivalences, in particular the fracture between proclaimed universalism and historically determined exclusions. In the twentieth century second half, the rights positivisation did not eliminate the enunciation and realization distance, but transformed the rights struggles into conflicts around rights, making their intrinsic opposition explicit. On a theoretical level, the essay examines the debate between deontological and balancing conceptions of fundamental rights and the courts role consequent strengthening, highlighting the political conflict juridification and neutralization risks.