This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are ‘second-generation rights’ – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.
Contributors
Philip Alston is the John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law and Director and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the NYU School of Law.
Christian Olaf Christiansen is an associate professor in the history of ideas at Aarhus University.
Nicolas Delalande is an associate professor of history at Sciences Po, Paris.
Rosie Doyle is a senior teaching fellow in Latin American history at the University of Warwick.
Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor in French at Stanford University.
Laura L Frader is a professor emerita of history at Northeastern University.
Mark Goodale is a professor of cultural and social anthropology and holds a chair at the University of Lausanne.
Steven L. B. Jensen is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
Philip Kaisary is an associate professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University.
Julia McClure is a lecturer in late medieval and early modern global history at the University of Glasgow.
Samuel Moyn is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and a professor of history at Yale University.
Scott Newton is a reader in the laws of Central Asia, SOAS University of London.
William J. Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.
Stephen W. sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History at the American University of Paris.
Meredith Terretta is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.
Bernard Thomann is a professor at INALCO (Paris) and the director of the Institut français de recherche sur le Japon à la Maison franco-japonaise (MEAE/CNRS) in Tokyo.
Charles Walton is a reader in history and director of the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre at the University of Warwick.