Chapter 1 demonstrates that the nineteenth-century medical record undermines the idea that each person could have only one sex. Throughout the period, several doctors made a stand for “true hermaphrodism,” many more could not identify the sex of their living patients, and “experts” constantly disagreed not only about findings, but also about how best to establish sex in unclear cases. Precisely because no one method for determining sex proved entirely foolproof, doctors and medical forensics experts often relied on narrative to support their claims – a narrative that closely mirrors the one being developed simultaneously in contemporary fiction, and especially, but not exclusively, by realist fiction. Herculine Barbin’s memoirs (the only extant memoirs of a nineteenth-century intersex person in Europe) find their literary corollary in popular fiction that shares much with the creativity and exploitation of narrative techniques in the medical record. Newly uncovered case studies challenge the longstanding representation of the rigidly polarized binary in nineteenth-century France as well as the Foucauldian thesis of “true sex.” Patients sometimes made their own sex determinations, or sought out multiple doctors in order to meet their needs.

In the editor’s introduction, Richard Boyd surveys the main intellectual sources for Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America. After sketching out how Democracy in America has been read in light of the influences of Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Blaise Pascal, and François Guizot, Boyd surveys the book’s contemporaneous receptions in France, England, and America. Consulting reviews from leading journals of the 1830s and 1840s, Boyd demonstrates that, while Democracy in America was universally acclaimed as a work of genius, its teachings about democracy were interpreted differently as a function of the ideological predilections of its readers. Tocqueville’s appeal to divergent political sensibilities – conservative and liberal democratic alike – anticipates a consistent pattern of subsequent thinkers adapting the book’s complex teachings to their own political circumstances. This rich tradition of appropriation is hardly confined to the United States or Europe but extends globally into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This chapter explores the development of social provisioning as a matter not of right but of democratic administration in France and the United States in the nineteenth century. The authors take issue with conventional chronologies of rights development, which see civil and political rights being developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with social rights appearing in the twentieth. Such categories and sequencing obscure the ways in which democratic administrations took the problem of social provisioning seriously. A history of socio-economic rights cannot be distinguished from the less formal technologies of socio-economic regulation that were an integral part of the democratic question across the nineteenth century, and, in particular, the modernisation of regulatory governance. The democratisation of administrative powers precluded any sharp distinction among the political, the social and the economic. For better and for worse, this process took place through the building, rescaling and redefining of older, pre-democratic technologies of governance in response to what were perceived as pressing public problems.

Although we are accustomed to think about the role of the state and international regulations in promoting socio-economic rights all over the world, there were alternative ways of thinking among the working-class movements before the twentieth century. The language of rights, justice and emancipation was central in many workers’ claims and struggles from the end of the eighteenth century, but they saw themselves as fighting for autonomy and emancipation rather than demanding state protection or capitalist integration. The debate over the primacy of political and civil rights, on the one hand, and socio-economic rights, on the other, provoked deep divisions among the socialist and anarchist movements up until the First World War. Looking at European and US workers’ debates and experiences during the nineteenth century, this chapter puts the issue of socio-economic rights (how they were conceived, fought for and contested) at the centre of a renewed intellectual and social history of labour movements. It pays close attention to the international dimensions of economic emancipation, as well as to the colonial, racial and gender limits of these socialist theories of rights and duties.