"There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human rights: 'Human rights is the idea of our time.' Everybody likes human rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights."

So begins Bob Black's eviscerating critique of perhaps the most sacrosanct dogma in modern political discourse -- the idea that humans have rights.

Observing that human rights are conspicuously overlooked in foundational works of moral and political philosophy, Black argues that their conception is best understood as a hypostatic promotion of legal rights that were originally codified and enforced to advance the interests of the State. By interrogating the conceit of transcendental discovery that animates various attempts to mold reality around the resulting id