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- Title
Why the neglect? Social rights and French Revolutionary historiography.
- Authors
Walton, Charles
- Abstract
Despite the rise of 'human rights' histories in recent decades, the subset of social rights has been largely neglected. To the degree that social rights—to subsistence, work and education—are acknowledged, they tend to be treated as 'second-generation rights'—as mid-twentieth-century additions to the corpus of civil and political rights stretching back to the eighteenth century. This article shows that debates over social rights also stretch back to that period. The author discusses why historians of the French Revolution have largely neglected social rights. One reason has to do with post-Cold War conceptions of human rights, which stress their liberal rather than socio-economic content. Another has to do with the recent tendency to subsume the 'social' within late eighteenth-century liberal political economy. In their effort to recast revolutionaries as 'social liberals'—as espousing free markets and social welfare—historians have obscured deep tensions over social rights and the obligation, or 'duty', to finance them.
- Subjects
FRENCH Revolution, 1789-1799; SOCIAL &; economic rights; HISTORY of human rights; UNITED Nations. General Assembly. Universal Declaration of Human Rights; DECOLONIZATION
- Publication
French History, 2019, Vol 33, Issue 4, p503
- ISSN
0269-1191
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/fh/crz089