The Riddle of Human Rights

Teeple, Gary

ISBN 10: 1551930390 / ISBN 13: 9781551930398

Published by University of Toronto Press, 2004

About this Item

Minor wear only. The pages are clean with no highlighting or writing detected. 30-day returns. Shipments destined outside Canada may be subject to duties in the country where the customer resides.; 6 X 0.7 X 9 inches; 274 pages; R5 910k/672k s3.

Seller Inventory # 8287

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Riddle of Human Rights
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551930390
• ISBN 13: 9781551930398
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Demands for "human rights" and resistance to their violation are rarely out of the news. Yet their definition is far from a settled matter, their legal status is quite varied, their uses and defence widely inconsistent between jurisdictions, and respect for them is blatantly limited. If it is held that all humans are abstractly equal in the possession of these rights, there is little agreement on anything else about them. The "human rights" of the United Nations' Charter and Universal Declaration contain a host of inconsis­tencies and a mixture of truths and untruths that contradict the assumptions of universality and timelessness.

Gary Teeple makes the case that "human rights" are peculiar to an historically given mode of production; they comprise the public declaration of the principles of the prevailing property relations. In that they are proclaimed absolute and universal is no different than similar declarations and beliefs about the nature of principles arising in different social formations. Although the tenets underlying "human rights" are distinct from pre-capitalist rights in several ways, there is one very significant distinguishing characteristic: implicit within them are goals that are qualitatively different from any relations yet realized in existing social formations.

About the Author

Gary Teeple is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.