Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History

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The aims of this volume are to rethink the history of social rights and, in doing so, help develop a historiography that speaks to the broader fields of human rights scholarship and practice. It is only very recently that a critical historiography on social rights has started to emerge, but it has yet to displace deeply rooted assumptions underpinning historical interpretations. These assumptions have, unfortunately, led to a number of distortions and misconceptions about the substance of these rights, their origins and their historical trajectories. There is a record to set straight before we can start re-imagining a more nuanced account of the long history of social rights, and this opening chapter tries to do that. First, it addresses how social rights have been misconstrued - both by sympathisers and sceptics. Second, it lays out a new approach to studying the long history of social rights, one in which the question of duties and obligations is central. Third, it presents the volume's three-prong structure and contents, which cover the medieval period to the present and span the globe. Taken together, the chapters of this volume seek to reshape the historiography of rights by examining the role and significance of social rights within it. They also explore the relation of these rights to questions about freedom, justice, equality and dignity in global history"--