Jacques Maritain once reflected on his participation in the discussions that led to the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In his book Man and the State (1951) he said that all of the participants in the discussions were agreed about the importance of human rights and indeed what human rights meant, but as soon as they tried to work out “why,” the agreement collapsed. The debate about human rights has perhaps never overcome this problem: Human rights are universally acknowledged, but it is rather hard to say why, and the situation gets even worse as soon as questions turn to the origins of human rights. Do we have rights by virtue of our biological humanity, or do we have them because of some quality or capacity that follows from our fragile embodiment? Do we have rights because of our sociability or are they rooted in natural law? Do human rights stand over and above the everyday or are they emergent from within it? More brutally, do we have rights at all? And who is this “we” to whom rights are imputed, imposed, or implied?

Inevitably, Andrew Vincent's book cannot answer all of these questions, and he is too modest even to try, but he has made a valuable and highly significant intervention in the debates. His starting point is to displace the question of the basis of rights, away from the qualities of humanity as such, or from nature or from some extrasocial realm. For Vincent, politics provides the key to unlocking the debate about human rights. He understands politics to be, “a certain form of ordering and maintenance of public existence…. [P]olitics is taken to refer to the acknowledgement of a plurality of interests, competitiveness over resources, and underlying uncertainty, which result from human association in any larger aggregations” (p. 236). Human rights, then, is a form of ordering and maintaining public existence. This perspective enables Vincent neatly to deal with the problem of the historical specificity of human rights: Even as these principles are declared to be universal, they have specific historical conditions of existence (human rights have not always been enunciated, and only the “enormous condescension of history”—to use E. P. Thompson's phrase—would make it possible to link the absence of human rights with barbarism). Human rights become emergent properties of large-scale human association, and they are ways of dealing with the plurality of interests and competition without falling into the twentieth-century trap of genocide.

Given the historical awareness underpinning Vincent's analysis, but given also his emphasis on politics, his argument attributes to the state a very ambiguous position. He identifies what he calls the state reflexivity syndrome, in which the state “forms the primary prosecutor of human rights, however, at the same time it is the key defendant” (p. 175). In short, the state is the institutional basis of human rights (a situation confirmed by the statehood of the signatories of the Universal Declaration), and yet historically also the agent most likely to infringe human rights. When it comes to human rights, the state is police and criminal at the same time.

Vincent gets around this problem by distinguishing two different kinds of state. First of all, there is the organic state, which historically stresses “an overwhelmingly strong emphasis upon a common or shared culture or identity, something which makes the state unique” (p. 172). The organic state manages plurality by making the interests of the purportedly homogeneous nation (with its referents of shared yet unique culture, ethnicity, and likely space) absolutely paramount. Although Vincent himself does not make the connection, this kind of state can be seen to be illustrated in Zygmunt Bauman's depiction of the modern Nazi state, which prosecuted the Holocaust. Second, Vincent distinguishes the civil state, which is “taken as the location of sustained consideration of constitutionalism, public law, self-limitation, and ultimately human rights” (p. 3). The civil state, then, limits the threats implied by the organic state because it is based on principles, not presumptions, and these principles are focused on the maintenance of public existence stretching beyond purportedly organic associations. Put another way, in Vincent's terms, if the organic state is the potential accused in the court of human rights, the civil state is the prosecutor and judge.

This is a powerful argument. It is also analytically rich. Vincent locates the discussion about human rights firmly in the field of institutions and history. On this basis, it becomes possible to explore the specificity of the emergence of human rights. It also becomes very possible to examine the interrelationships of states both as actors in a struggle over resources and as self-limiting agents, together constituting an international order based in constitutionalism and law. All of this offers a significant advance on what can too easily happen to discussions of human rights when the rights themselves are taken simply to be sticks with which to beat practice in the “real world.” Vincent's connection of human rights to politics is useful and apposite.

The author opens up an analytical terrain that makes his emphasis on the state (either organic or civil) seem to be overly restrictive, however. For Vincent, the question of the “ordering and maintenance of public existence” necessarily turns the analysis to the state. Specifically, the civil state is understood as the political form that captures “the development of human association over the last century particularly” and has helped ensure that “certain standards of civil behaviour have become, for a certain sector of humanity, slowly, painfully, and imperfectly more customary” (p. 1). This definition concedes that whatever the relationship between the civil state and human rights, the impetus for both actually comes from sociological factors. These sociological factors consist in the increasing complexity and extensiveness of human association. This point is perhaps best put in the terms of the sociology of Norbert Elias: Vincent's approach opens the space for an appreciation of human rights as an emergent property and expression of the changing patterns of interdependency. As such, the analysis of human rights ought not to turn to the state, since that is only to examine symptoms; the analysis ought instead to turn to the changing patterns of interdependency. From this sociological point of view, human rights are to be understood hermeneutically as at once an expression of, and way of gaining entry into the detail of, interdependency.

Vincent has written an extremely interesting and analytically suggestive treatment of human rights. However, his analysis suggests lines of inquiry that go beyond the argument in his book. But the point is this: If the discussion is carried out in a respectful and civil way, it will be a small testament to both human rights and to the importance of The Politics of Human Rights.