Kantolope reviewed What's Wrong with Rights? by Radha D'Souza
Really Good At What it Sets Out To Do
4 stars
Just to start off, I would have given this book 4.5 Stars if I could have. If you want a book that eloquently articulates how the discourse of human rights is used by multinational institutions to actually repress peoples in Third World countries, this is it. It begins by giving a brief history lesson on what function rights discourse served during the classical liberal period, and then contrasts them with how it is used today. It also gives a great analysis of how to organize and theorize for emancipation with consistent standards, without getting bogged down in rights discourse. If this is what you want out of a book, then I wholeheartedly recommend it, and you can probably stop reading this review now. It's a little unfair to judge a book by what it isn't, but with a name like What's Wrong With Rights I was hoping for a discussion …
Just to start off, I would have given this book 4.5 Stars if I could have. If you want a book that eloquently articulates how the discourse of human rights is used by multinational institutions to actually repress peoples in Third World countries, this is it. It begins by giving a brief history lesson on what function rights discourse served during the classical liberal period, and then contrasts them with how it is used today. It also gives a great analysis of how to organize and theorize for emancipation with consistent standards, without getting bogged down in rights discourse. If this is what you want out of a book, then I wholeheartedly recommend it, and you can probably stop reading this review now. It's a little unfair to judge a book by what it isn't, but with a name like What's Wrong With Rights I was hoping for a discussion on the justifications of rights themselves. After all, rights require some state to enforce them, so any anarchist community by definition cannot respect rights, even if such rights would have been respected if nothing was changed but adding a state. Such further analysis is absent in D'Souza's work, and I do think that it suffers a little for it. A person who didn't want to accept D'Souza's conclusion could argue against it by saying "I agree that rights are used to cause untold human suffering, but that doesn't make them wrong". Other than that little quibble, this is a fantastic read, and something that everyone interested in organizing or advocacy should give a go.