Freedoms and Solidarities In Pursuit of Human Rights [Hardcover]

Building on the materials of the first two volumes in their trilogy on human rights, in this third volume Blau and Moncada situate many of their arguments within the classical tradition of critical social science, but they also advance the genre of utopian social thought. This is not, in their hands, a speculative undertaking. They draw from empirical evidence, including many national comparisons. In volume 2, for example, they show how the U.S. Constitution could be updated and revised to include the human rights provisions that most other constitutions do, and in volume 3 they discuss ways that participatory democracy could work in the United States and elsewhere, and they lay out possibilities for economic democracy and worker ownership.Much has been written about growing global disparities in wealth and resources, how global capitalism has adversely affected human populations and the environment, and the dangers that a unipolar world order poses to peace and global pluralism. After summarizing the evidence for these arguments, the authors develop two main themes: first, that there is a growing transformative peoples' movement that challenges global capitalism and the imperial superpower; and, second, there is an extraordinary worldwide shift underway in human consciousness that accompanies practical global interdependencies and connectedness. The authors provide evidence for an emerging foundation of what philosopher Peter Singer describes as a 'one-world ethic,' and they show how this ethic is closely connected with what is called the 'human rights revolution.' They compare the western, liberal conception of freedom with conceptions of freedom found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Amartya Sen, and draw from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition to clarify that freedom has both collective and individual dimensions. They build on these foundations to address the following topics: positive human rights, collective goods, cosmopolitanism, social and cultul#q