Customer Reviews

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

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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.