Natural Law and Political Realism in the History of Political Thought

This second volume completes the author’s account of natural law and political realism as historical traditions of political thought. In it, the development of those traditions is traced from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, with special emphasis given to theories of human nature and the ‘natural’ or ‘human’ rights doctrines that have been derived from them. These things are examined also in the context of the comparatively recent internationalisation of political theory. The final chapter addresses the question of whether the modern rhetoric of human rights and humanitarian intervention rests upon a coherent philosophical foundation.