
The Library
Why the neglect? Social rights and French Revolutionary historiography
Tools
Walton, Charles (2019) Why the neglect? Social rights and French Revolutionary historiography. French History, 33 (4). pp. 503-519. doi:10.1093/fh/crz089 ISSN 0269-1191.
|
PDF
WRAP-why-neglect-social-rights-revolutionary-historiography-Walton-2019.pdf - Accepted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (505Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crz089
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.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DC France H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799, France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Historiography, France -- History -- Consulate and First Empire, 1799-1815, Historiography -- France -- History -- 18th century, Social rights -- France -- 18th century | ||||||||
Series Name: | French History | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | French History | ||||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0269-1191 | ||||||||
Book Title: | Social Rights and Duties | ||||||||
Editor: | Walton, Charles | ||||||||
Official Date: | December 2019 | ||||||||
Dates: |
|
||||||||
Volume: | 33 | ||||||||
Number: | 4 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 503-519 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1093/fh/crz089 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in French History following peer review. The version of record Charles Walton, Why The Neglect? Social Rights and French Revolutionary Historiography, French History, , crz089 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crz089 | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 21 June 2019 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 2 January 2022 | ||||||||
Related URLs: |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
![]() |
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year