Description
Book SynopsisIn arguing for a recognition of human rights as ontologically grounded in shared vulnerability, the author pays attention to the complex relationships among the state, the social rights of citizens that the state creates, and the human rights of persons as individuals.
Trade Review“Bryan Turner’s Vulnerability and Human Rights is a concise but wide-ranging discussion of cutting-edge themes in sociology, seen through the prism and oriented toward the realization of the human rights paradigm. Avoiding foundationalist fallacies, it seeks to establish a grounding for the idea of human rights in our unavoidable vulnerability. The book will make a major contribution to the growing contemporary discussion in the field.”
—John Torpey,CUNY Graduate Center
“Professor Turner’s work stands as a genuine contribution to an area of human rights analysis much written about but little felt as a problem for individuals—in microscopic no less than macroscopic dimensions. He examines how the process of life-taking is the perverse reverse of life-giving. It thus merits thoughtful reading and analysis by those for whom such weighty matters still form part of the sociological vocabulary.”
—Irving Louis Horowitz Contemporary Sociology
“This short and often sparkling book brings together many of the intellectual themes with which the followers of Bryan Turner will already be familiar. The book skilfully links questions related to human rights and citizenship and the sociology of the body and religion.”
—Nick Stevenson Sociology
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
1. Crimes Against Humanity
2. Vulnerability and Suffering
3. Cultural Rights and Critical Recognition Theory
4. Reproductive and Sexual Rights
5. Rights of Impairment and Disability
6. Rights of the Body
7. Old and New Xenophobia
References
Index
