"Bryan Turner’s Vulnerability and Human Rights is a concise but wide-ranging discussion of cutting-edge themes in sociology, seen through the prism and oriented toward the realization of the human rights paradigm. Avoiding foundationalist fallacies, it seeks to establish a grounding for the idea of human rights in our unavoidable vulnerability. The book will make a major contribution to the growing contemporary discussion in the field.” —John Torpey, University of British Columbia

"Professor Turner's work stands as a genuine contribution to an area of human rights analysis much written about but little felt as a problem for individuals—in microscopic no less than macroscopic dimensions. He examines how the process of life-taking is the perverse reverse of life-giving. It thus merits thoughtful reading and analysis by those for whom such weighty matters still form part of the sociological vocabulary. Professor Thomas Cushman's new series for Sanford G. Thatcher and Penn State University Press merits serious at tention. If this first volume in the series is an indicator of things to come, it also deserves wide professional support." —Irving Louis Horowitz, Contemporary Sociology

In the twentieth century, the mass violence of the two world wars followed more recently by the decentralization and privatization of warfare—manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—have led to a heightened awareness of human beings vulnerability to suffering and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. As something they all share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, this common vulnerability provides a ground on which to construct a framework of human rights.

Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology, which (like anthropology) has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “ value neutrality” of positivistic science. This expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

In arguing for a recognition of human rights as ontologically grounded in shared vulnerability, Turner pays special attention to the complex relationships among the state, the social rights of citizens that the state creates, and the human rights of persons as individuals. The conflict between national sovereignty and the universalistic claims of human rights is central to the struggle over human rights today, he shows, but while the protection offered by states and citizenship has been declining, they nevertheless remain important for the enforcement of human rights.