David McGrogan – författare

Liberalism, conceived as that set of political doctrines that proposes the liberty of the population as a justification for state authority, is currently undergoing a process of critique and problematisation. Indeed, we appear to be reaching a moment at which liberal hegemony could be thought to be, if not coming to an end, then at least weakening under sustained pressure.Since much of this pressure currently comes from the political right, it is an apt moment to bring together and analyse the rich theoretical arguments that those on the philosophical and intellectual right have produced since the French Revolution, in order to make sense of the current political moment. This book provides this with a collection of essays from writers from across the globe, situated in a variety of disciplines, including history, law, political science and computing, whose contributions trace the roots of the conservative critique of liberalism and predict its trajectory.A valuable toolkit for scholars and students interested in the relationship between conservatism and liberalism, this book is a vital one for those in the disciplines of political science, philosophy, history, law and sociology.

This open access book is a crucial intervention in the debate concerning positive human rights obligations.There is nowadays no dispute in human rights doctrine over whether rights entail positive duties on the part of the state at the level of principle. But there has been surprisingly little academic commentary devoted to the question of whether there are, or should be, limits placed on how far those obligations extend. Similarly, there has been little scholarly attention paid to the question of how causation can be reasonably attributed in the context of violations of positive obligations. And there are very few sociological explanations provided as to why positive human rights obligations appear to be expanding without principled limits in the first place.This volume assembles the work of a range of leading scholars in international human rights law to fill these gaps in the literature. Each of its 11 substantive chapters addresses an aspect of positive obligations with a particular focus on issues concerning limits. Taken together, they provide the first serious attempt to grapplecritically with the subject of the limits, causality and scope of positive obligations theoretically and doctrinally. This makes the book essential reading for scholars of human rights law.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights’ evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the ‘human rights performance’ of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the ‘governmentalisation’ of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.