genealogies of human rights

A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality is a window to one of the most important historians of all time. The exclusive Liberty Fund edition of F.W. Maitland's classic includes a note on Maitland by Charles Haskins and a general account of Maitland's life and work, "The Historical Spirit Incarnate: Frederic William Maitland," by Robert Schuyler. A historian's historian, F.W. Maitland was never to be caught indulging in fanciful speculation about times long past.

At the present day, when there is renewed interest in the concept of human rights and in the application of this concept to the problems of government, it may be instructive to review an eighteenth-century dispute which was concerned precisely with these themes. Nor should the investigation be any less interesting because the disputants were Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine: both these men have also been the object of renewed attention and study in recent years. Critical work on the biography and bibliography of Paine is being done by Professor Aldridge and Col.

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions.

First published in 2002. This is Volume XI of twelve in the Library of Philosophy series on Ethics. This study is the author's criticism of some political and ethical conceptions outlined on Natural Rights and was written in 1894.

The author advances the thesis that if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free.

The author argues the concept of human rights is a development of the older notion of natural rights and that the modern understanding of natural rights evolved in the context of the European struggle to legitimate its overseas empires. The French Revolution changed this by, in effect, linking human rights to the idea of citizenship. Human rights were thus tied not only to a specific ethical-legal code but also implicitly to a particular kind of political system, both of inescapably European origin.

In current political debates, the term “cosmopolitanism” is often used in quite vague ways, as part of sweeping generalizations that might not hold up to closer scrutiny. Imperfect Cosmopolis aims to clarify the meaning of the term by approaching it from a decidedly historical perspective—distinguishing, for example, between types of cosmopolitanism and the development of the concept through the centuries.

The closing months of his presidency, Bill Clinton and some of his entourage have taken to using the buzzphrase "human and political rights" to replace the simpler "human rights. Despite attempts to base the rights on "nature", in most cases they—by their very design—either run counter to nature or, at best, concern things about which nature is strictly neutral. There is nothing wrong with defining rights in terms of high human aspirations, but they will then require a very different justification from rights based on human needs.

Evidence for Hope makes the case that, yes, human rights work. Critics may counter that the movement is in serious jeopardy or even a questionable byproduct of Western imperialism. They point out that Guantánamo is still open, the Arab Spring protests have been crushed, and governments are cracking down on NGOs everywhere. But respected human rights expert Kathryn Sikkink draws on decades of research and fieldwork to provide a rigorous rebuttal to pessimistic doubts about human rights laws and institutions.

The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights.