Human Rights: Rhetorics and Practices

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. What are Human Rights? 3. Theory of Human Rights: Philosophy and Politics. 4. Human Rights in Ancient Indian Tradition. 5. Human Rights in the Western Tradition. 6. Human Rights Movement in Contemporary India. 7. Human Rights and Democracy. 8. Human Rights and Welfare. 9. Violation of Human Rights. Conclusion. Documents. Bibliography. Index

The promise of the book is that this is not so and that - what is more - there is a need to stern the deluge of ideas about human rights with a broad stocktaking intervention that both reassesses the stock of the debate and makes a series of evaluative arguments about which ideas have greater or lesser value.

The book neither claims nor sought to provide a central guide to the human rights literature but it does confine its critical engagement to identification of potential strengths and weaknesses with concepts and thinkers. As it is appropriate for those kinds of texts, it does not adopt a certain overarching position nor develop an overarching argument.

The book guides the reader through the key arguments of leading thinkers, explaining their place in the wider human rights debate and evaluating their critical reception. The book ends with a concluding chapter that examines how thinking about human rights in likely to develop in future.