Background
Maurice Cranston (1920-1993) was a British author, philosopher, and a professor of political science at the London School of Economics. Cranston's works include over fifteen publications ranging from biographies of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, to academic writings on political theory and philosophy.
Cranston's own political philosophy could be defined as traditional conservatism, and in his writings he criticized government policies that expanded state services like welfare and healthcare. In the inter-paradigm debate in human rights discourse, Cranston heavily favored natural rights over legal rights, arguing that the role of the state should be limited to protecting the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property as espoused by Locke.
In his book What Are Human Rights?, Cranston offers a historical and theoretical analysis of human rights, in which he argues the aforementioned viewpoint on the role of the state when it comes to human rights, and criticizes the role of Cold War and contemporary international institutions like the United Nations and the Council of Europe.
Cranston is not recognized as a major political theorist in contemporary American and European political science circles, and his presence in the Harry Ransom Center is intriguing. He is mostly remembered for his biographies and historical writings about the Enlightenment, covering thinkers that are generally considered central to Western political thought. Despite his own relative ambiguity in the topic literature, his philosophy is supported by other academics, like Patrick Cullen and Jean-Francois Revel, as well as rebuked by other academics, like Jack Donnelly and Henry Shue.