The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory: An Essay in Critical Theory Book

Ian Shapiro offers a systematic comparative evaluation of the writings of contemporary liberal rights theorists and those of their seventeenth-century predecessors. He shows how contemporary arguments about rights and justice evolved out of the contractarian tradition of the seventeenth century, but he argues that they are dangerous mutations of that tradition. Some of the deepest difficulties of contemporary rights theories derive from the appropriation of parts of the older tradition without the unifying assumptions about knowledge and science that gave the seventeenth-century arguments their underlying coherence. Liberals have also sought to provide foundations for their political philosophies by infusing the English contract tradition with a version of Kant's ethics, and Ian Shapiro argues that this deontological foundation is untenable. He concludes by arguing that it is impossible to theorise normatively about substantive issues of social justice without dealing with controversial empirical questions.