Are human rights universal or culturally bounded? From what religious or philosophical premises are they derived? Do they conflict? Do they empower or instead disempower the weak and oppressed? What is their fate in an era of globalization? The key to answering these questions may lie more in historical than conceptual investigation. This is the hunch that inspires Micheline Ishay's remarkably learned and wide-ranging book. It delivers forceful conclusions, which need no belaboring by the author, since she allows them to emerge from the historical record. Among the lessons we learn are that human rights should indeed be viewed as universal; that they draw nourishment from diverse ideological sources; that their meaning has always been contested, though not primarily along cultural lines; that civil and political rights on the one hand and socioeconomic rights on the other have historically been dependent on each other; that the claim to national self-determination as a human right has often been a cover for human rights violations; and that the idea of human rights has regularly been reborn, often strengthened, after periods of tyranny and oppression.

Ishay begins by recalling the quandary of the United Nations when in the late 1940s it assumed the challenge of drafting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When UNESCO, its educational, scientific, and cultural organization, polled more than 70 leaders and scholars representing the world's major religious and philosophical traditions, their responses demonstrated a broad if imperfect consensus regarding human rights norms and principles. Taking her cue from the UNESCO study, Ishay surveys the moral teachings found in Hammurabi's code, the Hebrew Bible, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, classical Greek and Roman philosophy, the New Testament, and Islam. She discovers common themes that help lay a foundation for human rights: an effort to restrain violence and exploitation, a desire to soften the division between weak and strong through the assertion of reciprocal obligations, and an aspiration to peace and universal brotherhood. But the contributions of the various traditions are not identical, and each enriches the idea of human rights in a different way—Hinduism in encouraging respect for all existence, Confucianism in requiring cultivation of the self, Buddhism in emphasizing compassion, Judaism in demanding an ethical life guided by law, Christianity in exhorting universal love, Islam in its insistence on human equality and social solidarity. Each tradition has its limits also, and Ishay makes no attempt to hide their exclusionary and intolerant elements.

The bulk of the book (Chapters 2 through 6) is a macrohistorical narrative of the human rights struggle from the early modern period to the present. Ishay devotes equal space to the intellectual history of human rights and to the social, economic, and political context in which it unfolded. The attention to context takes much of the sting out of quarrels regarding the cultural origins of human rights. Although the intellectual elements of the human rights idea had been present in each of the world's major civilizations, it was only the historical conditions present in early modern Europe—political fragmentation, the Reformation and the ensuing wars of religion, the scientific revolution, the printing press, the empowerment of an independent merchant class, and the growth of the towns—that made possible their coalescence into a fully articulated and politically revolutionary theory. The subsequent story of human rights victories, setbacks, and transformations cannot be understood without attention to changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, European imperialism, decolonization, globalization, and a series of increasingly destructive wars. The author's grasp of the broad social forces that shaped the evolution of human rights is one of the most impressive features of the book; readers are treated to nothing less than a panoramic interpretation of modern world history.

Ishay's intellectual history presents a huge cast of characters. It brings to life arguments that raged between the proponents and critics of human rights, points out that many of the bravest and most original champions of human rights have been left out of the political theory canon, and emphasizes the dizzying intellectual diversity within the human rights camp itself. The differences between “levellers” and “diggers” in the 1640s, say, or between utopian socialists and English radicals in the early nineteenth century seem no less dramatic than the larger contest pitting reformers against defenders of the status quo. Ishay recovers the voices of oppressed and stigmatized groups; their protests have not only challenged the privileged to live up to professed human rights principles but also fostered more just, generous, humane, and universal conceptions of human rights. If the Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers a more complete vision than, say, the 1689 English Bill of Rights, it is only because succeeding generations of excluded populations—women, children, the elderly, nonwhites, foreigners, colonized peoples, indigenous groups, ethnic and racial minorities, workers, the poor, sexual minorities, ill people, disabled people, refugees, prisoners, and war victims—have fought to broaden the scope and meaning of human rights. A disappointing feature of the author's discussion, however, is the failure to address the mistreatment of prisoners and criminal defendants in the United States and elsewhere. The omission stands out in a book that is otherwise comprehensive in its coverage and compassion.

A major theme of the book is the debt owed to the socialist movement. Socialist writers and activists, including Marx and his entourage, helped lead the Herculean nineteenth-century struggle to realize the human rights vision in both the economic and political spheres—to broaden suffrage, extend education, humanize working conditions, and provide social insurance. Liberals have no reason to feel superior: “If liberalism—rightly celebrated for its contribution to civil rights—is more than its colonial legacy, socialism—which championed the rights of the hardworking and powerless poor—is more than Stalinism and Maoism” (p. 119). Socialists well understood the mutual dependence of civil-political and socioeconomic rights, and promoted the universal vision of human rights by fostering alliances between workers and other disadvantaged groups. Ishay takes seriously the debates over political strategy among socialists, though she is excessively generous in ascribing a human rights vision to radical figures like Lenin, given his ruthless subordination of means to ends and, as she herself points out, the political terror over which he presided. She casts a warier eye over the claim to self-determination as a human right, noting that Wilsonian self-determination became a rhetorical gift to Hitler during the Sudentenland crisis and continues to serve as a shield for repressive governments today. She concludes that “self-determination should be regarded as a formal and abstract right, devoid of content—unless one considers the fairness of the political, social, and economic arrangements awaiting the individuals comprising these subjected groups once they achieve independence” (p. 174).

In her final chapter, Ishay reminds us that the public and private spheres, both necessary for human rights, emerged slowly and with difficulty over the past few hundred years. Today, both spheres face threats from globalization and from the preoccupation with security after 9/11. Her verdict on globalization is mixed: While it has handed dramatic victories to multinational capital at the expense of the world's poor, it has also inspired new social movements to address problems of multicultural citizenship, labor rights, and environmental degradation. Observing that the rhetoric of a “War on Terror” dangerously undermines human rights, the author eloquently pleads for a more intelligent form of political realism, one that understands that a genuine, rather than merely nominal, commitment to human rights is necessary for enhancing global security.

Micheline Ishay vividly demonstrates the power of the human rights ideal. The History of Human Rights, almost encyclopedic in scope and filled with theoretical insights, is a major scholarly achievement. It joins Paul Gordon Lauren's The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (2003) as an indispensable reference. By illuminating past struggles that have informed contemporary human rights, Ishay improves our understanding of their meaning. She lets us overhear a sprawling and impassioned discussion spanning many centuries. As she makes clear, the conversation has barely gotten started.