Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History

Steven L. B. Jensen is Senior Researcher at The Danish Institute for Human Rights. He is author of the multiple prize-winning book The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization and the Reconstruction of Global Values (2016) and co-editor of Histories of Global Inequality: New Perspectives (2019). He has previously worked for the UNAIDS and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Charles Walton is Reader in History at the University of Warwick. He is author of the prize-winning Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (2009) and editor of Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (2012) and a special issue on social rights in French History (2019). He has previously taught at Sciences Po and Yale University.

• Introduction: 1. Not 'second-generation rights': rethinking the history of social rights Steven L. B. Jensen and Charles Walton; Part I. Religion, Markets, States: Sources of Social Rights before the Twentieth Century: 2. The rights of the poor: taking the long view Julia McClure; 3. Public welfare and the natural order: on the theological and free-market sources of socioeconomic rights Dan Edelstein; 4. Who pays? Social rights and the French revolution Charles Walton; 5. The Haitian revolution and socioeconomic rights Philip Kaisary; 6. Of rights and regulation: technologies of socioeconomic governance in a revolutionary age Stephen Sawyer and William Novak; 7. Socioeconomic rights before the welfare state: labour movements and economic emancipation in nineteenth-century Europe Nicolas Delalande; Part II. Race, Gender, Class: Social Rights and the Paradoxes of Difference: 8. The soviet social: rights and welfare reimagined Scott Newton; 9. The Japanese 'welfare society': social rights and the seeds of the precariat? Bernard Thomann; 10. Liberation theology, social rights and indigenous rights in Mexico (c1965–2000), Rosie Doyle; 11. The unhappy marriage of gender and socioeconomic rights in France Laura Frader; Part III. Social Rights in the Age of Internationalism: The Politics of State Obligations: 12. The spirit of social rights, Samuel Moyn; 13. From human welfare to human rights: considering socioeconomic rights through the 1947–1948 UNESCO human rights survey Mark Goodale; 14. Claiming land, claiming rights in Africa's internationally supervised territories Meredith Terretta; 15. The road from 1966: social and economic rights after the international covenant Christian O. Christiansen and Steven L. B. Jensen; Epilogue: 16. The present and future of social rights Philip Alston; Index.

'This collection expands our view of rights, bringing together differing opinions among its authors, looking back in time, and bridging the false dichotomy between social and political/civic rights. These valuable essays combine attention to historical detail with a keen sense of the intellectual and political stakes in debates over rights.' Frederick Cooper, New York University