Global justice and the grassroots : comments on T. Pogge: "Human rights as minimal constraints on the design of global institutions"

My task as a discussant from the discipline of social anthropology is to provide some anthropologically-inspired comments on the paper by Thomas Pogge (TP), ‘Human rights as minimal constraints on the design of global institutions’, which was circulated to the conference participants and provides a general background to the more narrowly-focused paper he actually delivered. . I shall enclose my comments between some general observations on what I take to be TP’s broad objectives and some thoughts on what form of the liberalism which inspires them might be most accessible to the perspective from what I shall loosely call ‘the grassroots’