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3 - Social Rights

from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Glauco Schettini  and
Charles Walton
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 dismantles the long-standing narrative that social rights only emerged after civil and political rights, as a response to socialist critiques of liberalism. The foundations for such rights extend back to medieval Christian laws governing charity. It was the economic theories of the eighteenth century that secularized justifications for the “rights” of the neediest. French revolutionaries adopted these arguments, linking social rights to principles of reciprocity and duties, but they fought over who had the duty to finance them: the state (through taxes) or civil society (through markets and charity). As a result of these struggles, social rights became associated with “terror” and were abandoned. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church advanced its own understanding of social rights, grounded in the mutual obligations of humans in society (as opposed to the perceived individualism of the revolutionary declarations). These religious doctrines, together with certain strands of liberalism and socialism, informed conversations around social rights throughout the nineteenth century.

Keywords

social rightsT. H. MarshallDupont de NemoursFrench RevolutionSaint-DomingueFrançois-Noël BabeufCatholicssocialistsliberalsRerum Novarum
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 71 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Behr, T. C., Social Justice and Subsidiarity: Luigi Taparelli and the Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thought (Washington, DC, Catholic University of America Press, 2019).Google Scholar
Charlesworth, L., Welfare’s Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law (London, Routledge, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gross, J. P., Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Hufton, O., The Poor of Eighteenth Century France: 1750–1789 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974).Google Scholar
Jensen, S. L. B., and Walton, C. (eds.), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClure, J., “The Legal Construction of Poverty: Examining Historic Tensions between Property Rights and Subsistence Rights,” in Chadwick, A. and Egan, S. (eds.), Poverty and Human Rights (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2021), pp. 54–67.Google Scholar
Mason, L., The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2022).Google Scholar
Misner, P., Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (New York, Crossroad, 1991).Google Scholar
Moses, J., The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Social States (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moyn, S., Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Murray, T., Contesting Economic and Social Rights in Ireland: Constitution, State and Society, 1848–2016 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Malley, M., Wilhelm Ketteler and the Birth of Modern Catholic Social Thought: A Catholic Manifesto in Revolutionary 1848 (Munich, Herbert Utz, 2008).Google Scholar
Scotto, P., “Thinking the Future of Work through the History of Right to Work Claims,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 20/10 (2019), 1–19.Google Scholar
Stedman-Jones, G., The End to Poverty: A Historical Debate (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Thompson, N., The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775–1850 (London, Pluto Press, 1998).Google Scholar

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