Alexandre Lefebvre reads human rights afresh in this well-researched and ambitious project by calling attention to the important yet neglected role of care of the self. Lefebvre begins with the critical role that care of the self plays in Michel Foucault’s later writings, and then provides in-depth analyses of how the concept is central to the writings of five prominent human rights thinkers: Mary Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Henri Bergson, Charles Malik, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Instead of synthesizing their approaches into one coherent theory, Lefebvre holds that each provides an illustrative example making up something of a “portrait gallery” (p. 47) where each can be mobilized, depending on the context.

Lefebvre innovatively demonstrates that for each of these thinkers, the function of human rights is not primarily as a tool to address the ills of others or even as a way to make claims against the state, but as a method for “personal transformation and self-empowerment” (p. 7). For instance, Bergson saw human rights as a way for an individual to cultivate an open form of morality that would lead to heightened spirituality, love, and joy. Likewise, for Wollstonecraft, fighting against the impoverished existence of women in her age, human rights had an educational and ethical function, providing an image of a full person to which women should aspire.

For Lefebvre, these thinkers are simultaneously proponents of poiesis or intentional self-making and diagnosticians. Diagnosis of the current conditions takes place through self-making against the predominant ways of life, so that self-making itself is a form of resistance. For instance, Wollstonecraft was challenging the patriarchy grounded in chivalry of her time, Tocqueville feared the rising individualism endemic to the United States, and Malik’s writings repeatedly warned against the evils of collectivism.

Lefebvre’s chapters on Malik and Roosevelt are especially well research and nuanced. They make important contributions to recent historiography on the crystallization of human rights in the post–World War II era. The chapter on Bergson nicely complements Lefebvre’s important previous book on Bergson and human rights. Along the way, Lefebvre also addresses many recent debates in human rights scholarship, as well as the writings of recent theorists and historians, such as Lynn Hunt, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, Lisa Mallki, and Ella Myers.

The chapter on human rights education is less satisfactory and overly reliant on the United Nations documents on human rights education at the expense of the plethora of grassroots projects where human rights are one tool among others for empowerment, transformation, rights claiming, and self-making. It is here where the author might find some of the most exciting advances in care of the self in human rights work, especially in such fields as rights-based development, the vernacularization of human rights documents, and more radical forms of participatory development.

These critical approaches to human rights education beg the critical question of the relationship between care of the self and care for the Other. Both are critical for the thinkers discussed by Lefebvre, and teasing out the relationship between self and Other leads him to another use for human rights, at least for those who give priority to the care of the self. He concedes that care of the self could lead to depoliticized individualism and self-interestedness, but that care of the self when it is animated by human rights—as in the examples of Tocqueville, Bergson, Roosevelt, and Malik—is drawn out of the self toward the world and, thus, can “assume the form of care for others and the world” (p. 52), with the caveat that it must still be driven by care of the self.

Here, Lefebvre (following Foucault) is a hard-liner: “Care of the self in human rights is undertaken for the sake of one’s own self, period. If care of the self does not prioritize the self in this manner, then it is not, well, care of the self but rather something else” (p. 190). This position may be alluring, especially as Lefebvre seeks to stake a new claim in human rights scholarship, but it does lead him to temper the reach of his insights.

For example, in addressing Upendra Baxi’s critique of traditional human rights discourses, that they focus almost solely on the rights of the privileged in the Global North, Lefebvre concedes: “I am looking at how human rights contribute to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ and indeed, of a privileged minuscule of humanity” (p. 165). He tellingly concludes the book with a gloss on Hannah Arendt’s famous criticism of human rights belonging only to those who have citizenship, and not those like the refugee who need them the most. Lefebvre wonders if “perhaps it is worth giving some thought to the other side, namely the citizen who has his or her human rights comfortably doubled by civil and political rights” (p. 193). What do human rights mean for this First World person? The common answer is that human rights could raise awareness of the plight of the have-nots, but Lefebvre worries that this stance will risk a type of moralism or paternalism. The fear of moralism for the human rights project, though, is a perennial issue and has been fruitfully addressed by a number of scholars and human rights workers.

Lefebvre is right to point out the important function for care of the self of those privileged to enjoy a panoply of human rights, though it is only partially developed. Nevertheless, he could delve deeper into how care of the self not only diagnoses societal ills but also leads to a questioning of positionality and responsibility. Can we become a self without responding to the Other? Many human rights theorists and stakeholders see a dialectic in responding to others, creating the self, and resistance to injustice, and many claim that they find themselves only in service toward others.

What force, then, is there in religiously holding onto Foucault’s position that care of the self be primary? Lefebvre replies that these thinkers provide a more convincing justification for embracing a human rights perspective, namely, that it will lead to care of the self. Further, his approach promotes discernment between situations where care of the self will be appropriate, what he calls “first world problems” (p. 165) and the problems of catastrophe. This dichotomy is drawn too sharply, as many human rights activists in developing countries are fighting for what might be labeled privileged rights at the same time they face awful abuses. Care of the self as diagnostic and poietic is not relegated to the Global North, and indeed much of human rights work on the ground, even in conflict and oppressive situations with the most marginalized communities, now emphasizes empowerment and self-transformation. While Lefebvre’s examples all come from the Global North, they need not.

This very well written and provocative book is an important contribution to the history and philosophy of human rights, and several of the chapters could stand alone as insightful introductions to major human rights thinkers and controversies in the field.