Book Review: Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
| Author | SE Marshall |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917747316b |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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ideally functions, not on its form. The expectations for the family are politically and legally
established and maintained. It is symbiotically shaped in relation to the defined responsibilities of
other social institutions, including the market, but also the ‘state’.
3. Cooper argues that neo-liberals are not focused on the individual, as is often asserted by critics,
but on the family. I think that difference is not so clear. Neo-liberals do treat the family as an
entity, much like the legal treatment of the corporation that represents a ‘person’ in law.
However, like the corporation, the family is an entity through which the individual may satisfy
his needs and accumulate resources.
4. Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart, New York Times, 8 August 2017: https://www.
nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html?ref¼opinion.
ROWAN CRUFT, S MATTHEW LIAO AND MASSIMO RENZO (eds), Philosophical Foundations of
Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 702, ISBN 9780199688630, £39.99 (pbk).
Viewed from a distance of 25 years, the volume of essays which I reviewed in the first
issue of Social and Legal Studies in 1992 might look rather quaint, titled as it was
Women’s Rights and the Rights of Man.1 The general perspective of the essays was
roughly feminist, although as I noted in the review, whether all the essays could properly
be called ‘feminist’ is open to question, and the debate about what ‘feminism’ is con-
tinues. Since 1992, however, the debates have moved far beyond questions of ‘women’s
rights’ and into a dazzling arena of gender, race, identity, intersectionality theory and the
theorizing of transgender, all of which must now, in turn, inform feminist theorizing. So,
in one sense of ‘the field’ in which those 1990 essays might be located, there has been
great expansion in both the scope and the complexity of the questions that constitute it.
That, though, is not the field I am concerned to focus on in this review – there are others
far better qualified than I am to give a coherent, knowledgeable, reflection on it. Perverse
as it might seem then, especially given what I said above about the issue of ‘women’s
rights’, I have chosen to concentrate on the ‘field’ of rights, specifically on human rights
and even more specifically on the philosophy of human rights – on what might be
thought of as the area rightly flagged up in the 1990 papers above as objectionable, at
least in its historical characterization as ‘The Rights of Man’. So, for the purposes of this
review, the book I have chosen – Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (hereafter,
Foundations) – needs to be seen against the background of the relevant area of philo-
sophy since 1992. It needs to be recognized, however, that both the philosophical
boundaries of this field and the temporal restriction are bound to be a...
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