Humanité: John Humphrey's Alternative Account of Human Rights

Abstract

Humanité: John Humphrey's Alternative Account of Human Rights, Clinton Timothy Curle, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. xi, 211.Human rights are the predominant moral discourse of the modern world, but that does not mean that they are transparent, nor does that mean that there is universal agreement even among rights advocates regarding their grounding. Rights can find their firmament in the English tradition of contracts forged out of fear (Hobbes, Locke), in the German tradition of deontological rationality (Kant), and in an earlier, premodern conception of natural law (Aquinus). What any of these accounts profess, however, is a totalistic explanation of the terms of political engagement. All rights discourse tends toward globalization and homogeneity. We know, of course, that there is much resistance to this moral discourse of rights from political entities that want to hang on to their particular histories and cultures. Objections to the globalizing and homogenizing tendencies of rights have tended to come from the formerly colonized, the dispossessed and the marginal.