TY - CHAP
T1 - Recovering social rights
AU - Bhuta, Nehal
PY - 2024/5/7
Y1 - 2024/5/7
N2 - This chapter responds to a fundamental challenge made against social rights: that they are an inadequate legal and political language to address widening income and wealth inequality. In the opening sections of this chapter, I set out the terms of this challenge and situate it within wider critiques of the law and practice of human rights. I argue that these claims reflect a great deal of truth about the present of social rights, but do not accurately characterize their past. In the latter sections of the chapter, I recover a different register of social rights thinking that has faded from our collective memories—a register which infused the discussions of social rights in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I call these ‘natural social rights’ or ‘collective natural rights,’ and trace their lineages through English Radical thought, French Physiocratic thought, Jacobin and Neo-Jacobin thinking, to early twentieth century state theories and constitutional social rights. The essential insight gained from recovering these repertoires of social rights is the surprising extent to which social rights ideas laid the conceptual foundations for the social state.
AB - This chapter responds to a fundamental challenge made against social rights: that they are an inadequate legal and political language to address widening income and wealth inequality. In the opening sections of this chapter, I set out the terms of this challenge and situate it within wider critiques of the law and practice of human rights. I argue that these claims reflect a great deal of truth about the present of social rights, but do not accurately characterize their past. In the latter sections of the chapter, I recover a different register of social rights thinking that has faded from our collective memories—a register which infused the discussions of social rights in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I call these ‘natural social rights’ or ‘collective natural rights,’ and trace their lineages through English Radical thought, French Physiocratic thought, Jacobin and Neo-Jacobin thinking, to early twentieth century state theories and constitutional social rights. The essential insight gained from recovering these repertoires of social rights is the surprising extent to which social rights ideas laid the conceptual foundations for the social state.
KW - social rights
KW - history of social rights
KW - natural rights
KW - social state
KW - Jacobinism
KW - Chartists
KW - Lorenz von Stein
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85198693057&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/human-rights-in-transition-9780198901921?cc=gb&lang=en&#
U2 - 10.1093/oso/9780198901921.003.0001
DO - 10.1093/oso/9780198901921.003.0001
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
AN - SCOPUS:85198693057
SN - 9780198901921
T3 - Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law
SP - 1
EP - 56
BT - Human Rights in Transition
A2 - Bhuta, Nehal
PB - Oxford University Press
ER -