When We Talk about Human Rights

This essay explores the ways scholars of human rights, from various disciplines, contend with—or overlook—problems of consistency and precision in their subjects’ invocations of rights. Through its review of Lora Wildenthal’s The Language of Human Rights in West Germany and William Armaline et al.’s Human Rights in Our Own Backyard, the essay considers the strengths of two related analytical approaches: treating human rights as a political language; and treating human rights as an ideology rooted in a local history of ideas that shapes the way those rights operate in a particular society.