Wiktor Osiatyński's Human Rights and Their Limits is an analysis of human rights that draws from political theory, law, history, and comparative constitutional law. The book is not a sustained argument about the limitations of deploying human rights. Rather, it is a nuanced, well-researched study of the tensions and complexities that surround the language of such rights. The book makes three core claims. First, it provides a short history of human rights (Chapter 1). Second, it analyzes the different categories of human rights (Chapters 2–3). Third, it advocates for a kind of soft universalism (Chapters 4–5).

Chapter 1 explains the rise of the regime of human rights. Osiatyński shows how what began in medieval times as a claim of privilege, led to individual rights against the state, which in turn became a commitment to human rights. In laying out this time line, Osiatyński distinguishes between the Anglo-American conception of rights with its focus on restraining government power and its Continental counterpart with its emphasis on empowering the state. While this served as an interesting introduction to the book, Osiatyński needed to do more in discussing the rise of positive international law in light of the language of human rights. After all, the human part of human rights means that there must be some kind of legal authority that would enforce such claims, an authority that stands above and beyond any one single nation state. The concept of human rights, then, challenges the traditional Westphalian model of sovereignty.

Chapters 2 and 3 explore three distinct categories of human rights: “(1) civil rights and liberties; (2) political rights; and (3) social, economic, and cultural rights” (106). Civil rights include rights to be free from arbitrary arrest or the right to equal protection of the laws. Political rights include the right to vote and participate in democratic decision-making. Social rights include rights to welfare and education. Often these categories are conflated leaving the catchall phrase “human rights” to do the legal and normative work. Osiatyński importantly unpacks the notion of rights, analyzing the normative, historical, and legal differences among these kinds of rights claims. This was the most insightful part of the book. (Incidentally, it would have been useful to flag this typology at the beginning of the book). The scholarly literature usually either discusses political rights (the rights necessary for democracy) or distinguishes negative rights (civil rights) from positive ones (social rights). The negative/positive distinction points to the way in which civil rights are rights to be free from state interference and positive ones are rights to state interference.

Osiatyński discusses these two sets of questions but goes beyond them, interestingly focusing on the difference between social rights and civil/political ones. This is a novel inquiry, one that illuminates the complexity of human rights. Osiatyński suggests an important difference. As a historical matter, civil/political rights were rights that the state had to follow (e.g., provide avenues to vote or ensure criminal due process). Such rights from their origins were provided by the state. Social rights, though, emerged as obligations “between individuals within a society” (134). “A member of a rural community was not to pass a needy person without offering mercy and charity” (134). Whereas political/civil rights by definition entail state involvement (the state is necessary to ensure due process or administer elections), the private sphere provides welfare and employment, at least to some. This leaves the state to provide for those who cannot do so from the private sector. Accordingly, Osiatyński provocatively argues that we should characterize social rights as needs. The language of rights in this context unnecessarily frustrates democratic decision-making. Making a claim for state assistance in employment or welfare as a claim of needs rather than rights highlights the public policy nature of this inquiry. It also explains why there is such a divergence in the scope and range of constitutionally enshrined social rights or, in Osiatyński's terms, needs. For instance, while the United States Constitution does not provide for such needs, its European counterparts do so but to varying degrees. Osiatyński's comparative analysis is clear, nicely framing his typology of rights. In fact, this was one of the best analyses of this typology of human rights I've read in a long time.

Chapters 4 and 5 conclude by proffering a vision of “soft universalism.” That is, Osiatyński distinguishes between “the normative universality of human rights as standards and the philosophical universality of beliefs, values, and worldviews.” (145). Pointing to the often legitimate objections that human rights are mainly a Western notion, Osiatyński argues that while we may deny the philosophy of such rights (hard universalism), we ought to accept these rights as behavioral norms (soft universalism). “This is similar to the norms and rules included in a penal code that have to be observed by each individual, regardless of whether she shares (or even knows) the philosophical assumptions underlying the code” (175). This has the upshot, according to Osiatyński, to avoid the deep cultural disagreements that surround the language of human rights. It permits cultures to interpret rights according to their own system of beliefs and practices. But this soft universalism also endorses a core/fundamental set of rights that prevent “grave abuses perpetrated in the name of cultural differences” (176). These rights include the rights to life and legal personhood as well as the freedom from slavery, involuntary human experimentation, and arbitrary detention. Osiatyński's attempt to move away from a hard, ontologically fixed notion of human rights to a more reflexive version is admirable. It seeks to find some middle ground between cultural relativism and objections of Western-centrism. Yet, it is precisely in watering down the philosophical universality of human rights that Osiatyński's argument runs into problems. Aligning human rights with a legal positivistic criminal code obscures, even misses, the human part of human rights. The power of the language of human rights is that we possess rights independent of whether the law says so. And it is this fact that confounds the conventional conception of national sovereignty cited above. Osiatyński does not extinguish this dilemma but his account invites us (even if inadvertently) to face it head on. This is a core puzzle of human rights: These rights transcend legal positivism yet still need some mechanism of enforcement.

This book is a well researched, nuanced, and in many places provocative study of human rights. Its single greatest virtue is its breadth. It cogently explains what is at stake in a series of questions in the human rights literature, questions that are often conflated. It would be of interest to a wide range of political scientists including students of theory, comparative politics, and law.