Freedoms and Solidarities ─ In Pursuit of Human Rights

Building on the materials of the first two volumes in their trilogy on human rights, in this third volume Blau and Moncada situate many of their arguments within the classical tradition of critical social science, but they also advance the genre of utopian social thought. This is not, in their hands, a speculative undertaking. They draw from empirical evidence, including many national comparisons. In volume 2, for example, they show how the U.S. Constitution could be updated and revised to include the human rights provisions that most other constitutions do, and in volume 3 they discuss ways that participatory democracy could work in the United States and elsewhere, and they lay out possibilities for economic democracy and worker ownership.

Judith Blau is professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and president of the US chapter of Sociologists without Borders. She is the author of Architects and Firms, The Shape of Culture, Social Contracts and Economic Markets, and Race in the Schools, editor of The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, and co-editor, with Keri Iyall Smith, of The Public Sociologies Reader. She has published over 75 articles in scholarly journals, and was the president of the Southern Sociological Society. Alberto Moncada is president of Sociologists without Borders/Soci-logos Sin Fronteras and Vice-President of UNESCO-Valencia He has degrees in law, sociology and education, and is the author of over 30 books in Spanish, including three on Hispanics in the U. S. He is frequently interviewed by the Spanish media.