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Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights

Provides a more complete account of the human rights project that factors in the contribution of cosmopolitan Catholicism.

Leonard Francis Taylor (Author)

9781108486125, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 March 2020

312 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'This timely and challenging book takes us beyond the traditional histories of human rights law, exploring its often neglected roots in and links to the contested cosmopolitanism of Catholicism. Understanding the roots and limits of the modern human rights project requires continuous reflection and an openness to new ways of thinking about the ruptures that human rights claims seek to provoke. Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights will be an indispensable resource for all scholars and historians of the human rights project, and for critical and sympathetic observers of Catholicism's claims to universalism.' Siobhán Mullally, Established Professor of Human Rights Law and Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at National University of Ireland Galway

It is because Catholicism played such a formative role in the construction of Western legal culture that it is the focal point of this enquiry. The account of international law from its origin in the treaties of Westphalia, and located in the writing of the Grotian tradition, had lost contact with another cosmopolitan history of international law that reappeared with the growth of the early twentieth century human rights movement. The beginnings of the human rights movement, grounded in democratic sovereign power, returned to that moral vocabulary to promote the further growth of international order in the twentieth century. In recognising this technique of periodically returning to Western cosmopolitan legal culture, this book endeavours to provide a more complete account of the human rights project that factors in the contribution that cosmopolitan Catholicism made to a general theory of sovereignty, international law and human rights.

Introduction
1. Catholic cosmopolitan and the birth of human rights
2. Catholic cosmopolitanism from the centre to the periphery
3. Catholic cosmopolitanism from the periphery to international concern
4. Locating a modern Christian cosmopolitanism
5. An imperfect cosmopolitan project
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Law [L], Human rights [JPVH], International relations [JPS], Political science & theory [JPA], History of religion [HRAX], Religion & politics [HRAM2]

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