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17 - Human Rights during the 1848 Revolutions

from Part II - Postrevolutionary Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Mike Rapport
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter argues that the 1848 Revolutions can profitably be understood through the prism of arguments over rights. It highlights a series of contests between those who championed a “thin” conception of individual civil and political rights and those who defended a variety of “thicker” understandings: whether of rights as belonging to collectives, especially national minorities; as protecting cultural, linguistic, or gender identities and differences; or as demands for extensive state action to challenge economic domination of workers by landowners and capitalists. The offer of individual rights under a “thinner” constitutional order in the Habsburg monarchy was insufficient to address conflicts between the dominant Magyar nation and the claims of the regime’s other national groups; at the same time, these conflicts generated nuanced efforts to theorize individual and collective rights by figures such as József Eötvös. Ostensibly “thin” demands for individual equality under the law proved unable to protect individuals – particularly emancipated slaves, peasants, laborers, and women – from domination deep-seated in existing social structures.

Keywords

civil rightsminority rightsMagyar1848 RevolutionsEötvös
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 407 - 434
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Abrams, L., The Making of Modern Woman: Europe, 1789–1918 (London, Routledge, 2002).Google Scholar
Blerald, P.-A., “La Problématique démocratique dans le discours abolitioniste de Victor Schoelcher: Essai de philosophie politique,” Revue française de science politique 38/2 (1988), 249–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bouchet, T., “Socialist Vicissitudes on the Right to Work in France, 1848–1851,” French History 33/4 (2019), 572–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, C., Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (London, Penguin, 2023).Google Scholar
Davidson, A., The Immutable Laws of Mankind: The Struggle for Universal Human Rights (Dordrecht, Springer, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelstein, D., On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gregg, B., “Comparative Perspectives on Social Integration in Pluralistic Societies: Thick Norms versus Thin,” Comparative Sociology 11 (2012), 629–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jennings, L. C., French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Jones, P., The 1848 Revolutions (Harlow, Longman, 1981).Google Scholar
Kaplan, D., Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies: Universality without Uniformity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Körner, A. (ed.), 1848: A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave, 2004).Google Scholar
Moggath, D., and Stedman Jones, G. (eds.), The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Offen, K., European Feminisms: A Political History, 1700–1950 (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, R., The Revolutions of 1848 (Basingstoke, UK, Macmillan, 1998).Google Scholar
Rapport, M., 1848: Year of Revolution (London, Little, Brown, 2008).Google Scholar
Sperber, J., The European Revolutions, 1848–1851, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stearns, P. N., The Revolutions of 1848 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).Google Scholar

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