Recovering social rights

Nehal Bhuta*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

Abstract / Description of output

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHuman Rights in Transition
EditorsNehal Bhuta
PublisherOxford University Press
Chapter1
Pages1-56
Number of pages56
ISBN (Electronic)9780198901952
ISBN (Print)9780198901921
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 May 2024

Publication series

NameCollected Courses of the Academy of European Law
PublisherOxford University Press

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • social rights
  • history of social rights
  • natural rights
  • social state
  • Jacobinism
  • Chartists
  • Lorenz von Stein

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