Human Rights

Drawing on a hitherto neglected body of work in classical social theory, and combining it with ideas derived from Barrington Moore, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault, Woodiwiss he explains how and why rights discourse developed in the distinctive ways it did in four key sites: the United States, Britain, Japan, and the UN. On this basis he provides, for the first time, a general sociological account of the development of international human rights discourse.