Freedom and Rights

Freedom and rights rank high among the values to which we profess allegiance in the Western world. But it was not always so, neither in Classical Antiquity nor in Medieval Europe where they valued so highly. In the Communist world, they were dismissed as ‘bourgeois ideology’. Nationalist movements may pay lip-service to freedom and rights but after independence they all too often count for little. Does this matter? Are non-Western people missing something? Are there good reasons for the importance which we attach to them?

First published in 1968, Freedom and Rights is a critical study of freedom and rights as moral, social and political ideas. It opens with a comprehensive lucid review of important theories. These are then used by the author as the basis for a theory of his own which sets freedom and rights in a new perspective. This theory is developed through a discussion of fundamental issues in ethics, and in social and political theory, which is at once provocative and illuminating. The book goes beyond the work in Anglo-American philosophy at the time by presenting not only an analysis of concepts but a philosophical synthesis which makes an original contribution to the study of human values.