Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism
A global history of 'Biafra', providing a new explanation for the ascendance of humanitarianism in a postcolonial world.
Responsibilities: A Critical Legal Defence of Human Rights
For many, human rights have become a panacea for the injustices of society: globalisation, poverty, discrimination, climate change etc. But has this rights ‘inflation’ been a prima facie good? Has the rise in human rights merely propounded a self-centred individualism, exacerbating the marginalisation of large swathes of society who are already socially excluded? Rightly, human rights have been the subject of a multitude of criticisms, from a range of critical perspectives: Marxism, critical legal studies, communitarianism, feminism, critical race theory, etc. However, this unique study pushes back against this tide of ‘anti-rights,’ providing an original defence of human rights from...
Human Rights in Africa
An interpretative history of human rights in Africa, exploring indigenous rights traditions, anti-slavery, anti-colonialism, post-colonial violations and pro-democracy movements.
A False Tree of Liberty
This book is concerned with the history of the idea of human rights. It offers a fresh approach that puts aside familiar questions such as 'Where do human rights come from?' and 'When did human rights begin?' for the sake of looking into connections between debates about the rights of man and developments within the history of capitalism. The focus is on England, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, a heated controversy over the rights of man coincided with the final enclosure of common lands and the momentous changes associated with early industrialisation. Tracking back still further to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about dispossession, resistance and rights, the book reveals a forgotten tradition of thought about central issues in human rights, with profound implications for their prospects in the world today.
Re-Situating Utopia
In Re-Situating Utopia Matthew Nicholson argues that international law and international legal theory are dominated by a ‘blueprint’ utopianism that presents international law as the means of achieving a better global future. Contesting the dominance of this blueprintism, Nicholson argues that this approach makes international law into what philosopher Louis Marin describes as a “degenerate utopia” – a fantastical means of trapping thought and practice within contemporary social and political conditions, blocking any possibility that those conditions might be transcended. As an alternative, Nicholson argues for an iconoclastic international legal utopianism – Utopia not as a ‘blueprint’ for a better future, operating within the confines of existing social and political reality, but as a means of seeking to negate and exit from that reality – as the only way to maintain the idea that international law offers a path towards a truly better future.
The Last Utopia
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of huma...
Not Enough
The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. As state violations of political rights garnered attention, a commitment to material equality disappeared and market fundamentalism emerged as the dominant economic force. Samuel Moyn asks why we chose not to challenge wealth and neglected the demands of a broader social and economic justice.
Liberalism against Itself
The Cold War roots of liberalism’s present crisis By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his iconoclastic st...
