The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches and Documents from the Bible to the Present [Paperback]

Micheline R. Ishay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0415918499 | ISBN-13: 978-0415918497 | Edition: 1

This book presents the most comprehensive collection of essays, speeches, and documents, from historical and contemporary sources, available on the subject of human rights.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Ishay (Graduate Sch. of International Studies and director of the human rights program, Univ. of Denver) takes a historical approach to human-rights literature in this book. Her introduction summarizes each writing and its significance, with no critical analysis or comparison of any of the selections. To ground the reader in the religious/philosophical origins of human rights thinking, she chooses writings from Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam as well as classical philosophers. She then selects significant political writers such as Rousseau, Paine, Marx, and Gandhi, as well as lesser-known authors' works on women's, gay, and minority rights to illustrate the development of human rights consciousness during important historical periods. A selection of contemporary international documents such as the Helsinki Agreement and the Beijing Declaration conclude the collection. Although the work is relatively comprehensive, its appropriateness for library collections should be questioned, since both academic and public libraries would have many of the original works.?Jill W. Ortner, SUNY at Buffalo Lib.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

An exciting and invaluable collection of materials that is wonderfully edited, and manages to show the classical origins as well as the modern evolution of the human rights tradition. Indispensable for any serious student of the subject!
Richard A. Falk, Center of International Studies, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

The Human Rights Reader brings together a well-chosen group of classical and modern essays that address rights from the provocative perspective of political theory, comparative government, international relations, and ethics. Ishay's collection is an important contribution to the classroom literature on rights.
Benjamin R. Barber, Director, Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University

Here in one place are the seminal texts that show the depth and dimension of human rights thinking over the centuries. An inspiring work of scholarship and an indispensable collection!
Danny Schechter, Co-Executive Producer, Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (August 29, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415918499
• ISBN-13: 978-0415918497
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #506,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Law > Constitutional Law > Human Rights

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Does This Make You Understand Human Rights?, July 28, 2001

By 

Daan Bronkhorst (Amsterdam Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches and Documents from the Bible to the Present (Paperback)

Micheline Ishay's anthology of human rights documents encapsulates some 2500 years of history. It is very varied in its selections. In the "Early Origins" chapter, one finds the Bible and Buddha next to Plato and the Magna Charta. In the "Liberalism" chapter, the English Bill of Rights as well as Rousseau and Kant. In "Socialism", lots of Marx and some Engels (but no 20th century authors). And in the Appendix "Contemporary International Documents", sixteen texts dating from Roosevelt's 1941 Four Freedoms speech up to the 1990s human rights declarations of Vienna and Beijing. Some of the selections are both original and suprising. For example, there is a really funny essay on five types of "utopias" by Steven Lukes, an impressive philosophical observation on (in)humaness by Richard Rorty, and a sound refutation of the notion of "collective human rights" by Rhoda Howard and Jack Donnelly. Ishay introduces the book in a 40 pp. essay. This, actually, is more or less the only introduction the reader is offered. While Ishay has been really modest in this respect, her choice of texts is unguardedly wide. It may be argued that quotes from the classic books of world religions should be included, even though their relation with any "human rights" concept is not self-evident - or only very selectively so. It is less defendible to include Plato (who sketched utopian forms of government which would have violated virtualy every human right) or Thomas Aquinas (who defended the church, not particularly the rights of the individual). In the Liberalism chapter, Grotius and Thomas Paine find their place by right, but Kant had really little to say about human rights. Marx is represented in nine texts, far more than by any other author in this reader, still leaving the reader confused however as to what he contributed to human rights in the "universal", non-ideological sense of the word. The same may be said of authors such as Proudhon, Engels, Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg and Kautsky. If Ishay feels such writers made significant steps in the development of human rights notions and norms, she should have clarified the issues if only in summary introductions to these texts. As it stands now, the anthology reads rather like a textbook on intellectual history (Western history, in particular, with a leftist preference) than as a human rights handbook. This reader is useful for someone familiar with human rights history who likes to have the main texts wich illustrate the concept, or are in clear contradiction to it, at hand. Someone less familiar with that history may be bewildered by this collection, and feel less rather than more secure about his or her grasp of the subject.