Our concern in this book is with rights-based liberalism as a way for human beings to live together in peace and justice at both the domestic and international levels. Our aim is to explain its theory and practice but also to defend and commend it as a better way than alternative schemes of human association.

The heart of what we call the liberal project for world order has now become the United Nations human rights regime, the discussion and evaluation of which constitutes the centre of this study. Many books have been written on this regime on the one hand and on liberalism on the other. A few combine the two: the best of which being J. Donnelly's Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. There is also an excellent book on the evolution of international human rights in Lauren's work of that title. However, what is distinctive about our book is that it situates the UN human rights regime in the context of an evolving international society of sovereign states, the character of which we see as shot through with liberal assumptions. We show this by exhibiting the nature of liberalism as a theory and by revealing the affinities between liberal theory and the developing practice of state sovereignty both domestically and internationally.

After an introduction in which we explain what we understand liberalism to be, Part I is a study of the historical context from the seventeenth century, covering both early rights-based liberal theory and state practice in which the UN commitment to a strong human rights programme came to be made.