Benjamin Gregg, Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 288 pp.In this book, Benjamin Gregg calls for post-metaphysical approach to (2), thus accepting the origins of rights. Human rights, Gregg argues, are social constructs which have no biological or cosmological basis, and are thus open to cross-cultural borrowings. But this embrace of social constructivism where Gregg and anthropologists who study part company. Indeed, this book illustrates the significant gap between philosophical and anthropological approaches to rights.Gregg organizes his argument three sections. In Part I (Chapters 1-3), he makes the case for what, his Coda, he calls a of nation states practicing domestic cosmopolitanism (210). In Part II, he explains how rights-centered politics of can function university classrooms (Chapter 4), among post-Cold War Eastern European nation states (Chapter 5), and new forms of digital technology (Chapter 6). In Part III, he responds to the challenge of patriotism (Chapter 7), seeks to differentiate between democracy and the rule of law (Chapter 8), and briefly discusses the efficacy of humanitarian interventions (Chapter 9).In Part I, Gregg explains how human (not formal state, but voluntary group of individuals) can be the catalyst for developing acceptance of within existing nation states. This must be organic movement, grounded within local communities, in terms, he argues, resonate with that community (4). Once established, these local movements, composed of ordinary people, not local elites (38), will promote the acceptance of through institutionalized socialization (6), the goal being assertive selfhood (7) or, alternatively, politics of moral personhood (71). This will require, he suggests, an act of political imagination (27) performed by members who collectively authorize and recognize their own rights (28). Advocates will seize from the state (thus negating the claim that are granted by states) and thereby assert their own agency (as practitioners of rights). Through this process, members of states will persuade others to follow.Gregg distinguishes between (top-down) universal campaigns and (bottom-up) persuasive project, arguing that while the former imposed, the latter of potentially universal participation and hence a project of (socially constructed) universal validity (10). He suggests that as the acceptance of through persuasion increases, so too will the scope and number of states, eventually leading to broad universal agreement on (15). By way of example he mentions non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as self-selected groups of individuals who seek to expand rights.1In Part II, Gregg describes how university classrooms can be platforms for enabling students to develop human consciousness (84). This will occur through the cultivation among students of human style directed at two targets: nation states and cultural beliefs and practices (86). These targets signify Gregg's adherence to liberal thinkers stretching back to John Stuart Mill, who On Liberty (2006; originally published 1859) defined the enemy of as not just the state, but, more importantly, society. The despotism of custom, Mill wrote, is everywhere the standing hindrance to advancement, being unceasing antagonism to...the spirit of liberty, or that of progress and improvement (2006:70). In Gregg's hypothetical classroom, students are Western youth (109) firmly situated in the West (93-94). Beyond the reductionism (just who belongs to The West?), this perspective suggests not just that are the domain of The West while cultural beliefs and practices are found elsewhere, but that state can exist separate from culture. …