Abstract

Alan Gewirth is a powerful and meticulously careful thinker. His book, Human Rights, consists of a series of essays developed over the last dozen years, here collected from various journals. As such, the volume has the virtue of consistency derived from single authorship, but as is inevitable in such a collection, there is a rather considerable degree of repetition of basic contentions. A distinctive feature of the book is that its two parts are dedicated: one to general theoretical underpinnings of a theory of human rights, the other to applications about specific normative problems.