ABSTRACT
Contemporary academia generates vast amounts of human rights theory. Lawyers and anthropologists, philosophers and political scientists, historians and even natural scientists have contributed, and are contributing, to it. This chapter focuses on debates about human rights in legal and political theory. Providing a comprehensive exposition of theoretical argument in these two fields is still no easy task, particularly if one aims to offer an account that is not confined to the province of the present and includes a broader temporal dimension. Among the contemporary thinkers who see clear continuity between the natural rights tradition and the modern idea of human rights is James Griffin. The international human rights regime began with an argument about foundations. The distinction between naturalistic foundationalism and agreement foundationalism in contemporary thought mirrors that between rationalistic accounts of natural rights and contractarian ones in classical political thought.
