This book is an introduction to the subject of rights. I hope it will interest general readers, but it is aimed at upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates pursuing studies in ethics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, law, legal philosophy, jurisprudence, political science, political theory, or government. At a level of detail appropriate to an introductory book, it covers the history, formal structure, philosophical implications, and political possibilities and tendencies of the idea of rights.

It is impossible to understand what rights are without having a sense of their development over time, but the goal here is to bring current controversies into focus, and to indicate the likely direction of further discussion about the proper role of rights in our moral and political thinking. The most important of these controversies have been taking place on two planes: one plane being that of global politics and political philosophy in the widest sense, the other being a narrower plane on which legal philosophers have investigated the logic of the concept of rights. My aim has been to discuss the substantive concerns of political philosophy and the conceptual concerns of legal philosophy in a way that illuminates both.

One particular matter I hope this method illuminates has to do with understanding two different, though related, functions of rights – that is, rights as prohibitions and, contrastingly, rights as permissions.