3 - Public Welfare and the Natural Order

Summary

It is now well acknowledged that socio-economic rights were already recognised and defended at the time of the French Revolution. The aim of this chapter is not simply to extend the genealogy of socio-economic rights farther back. I wish to show that both socio-economic and political rights, during the French Revolution, came from the same intellectual source, namely the belief in a naturally regulated economic sphere. This belief would find its peak expression in Physiocracy, but it also informed a number of other liberal movements. Going back to the late seventeenth century, one even finds the assertion of socio-economic rights before that of political ones. Economic liberalism, in this sense, came before, but also paved the way for, political liberalism. This process extended up to the French Revolution, where it was deputies with strong Physiocratic attachments who pushed for both socio-economic and political rights.