American presidents have actively participated in the process that transformed the Declaration of Independence into a fully constitutive document. Many presidential citations are either ceremonial or express shared values. All presidents, however, claim the Declaration supports at least some of their favored policies on civil rights, governmental powers, the culture wars, and immigration. Liberal and conservative presidents dispute whether the Declaration supports regulation in the public interest or limited government. Presidents in the culture wars engage in parallel play, with more progressive presidents citing the Declaration when supporting the rights of LGBTQ persons, gun control, and liberal immigration policies, and conservative presidents citing the Declaration for bans on abortion, a greater place for religion in the public sphere, and crime control measures.

Roland Burke presents the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993 as showcasing human rights language as the “decisively triumphant discourse of the post-Cold War era.” Human rights champions gathered in Vienna after the end of the Cold War to inaugurate what they anticipated would be a new order for human rights, comprised of the minimalist state, formal democratization, and individual freedoms, with some cursory mention of welfare and inclusive development. Jensen’s contention that the delegitimization of socioeconomic rights in international politics coincided with a narrowing of human rights, rather than its successful expansion as an international movement, crucially challenges the triumphant narrative that Burke recovers.

In crosscurrents of the shift away from an imperial world order surfaced another contentious debate over changing hierarchies within human rights: Were universal human rights primarily about socioeconomic rights (requiring states to strengthen social welfare and economic opportunity), or were they about the right of individuals to exercise their civil and political rights? In underscoring a need for histories of socioeconomic rights that account for interactions between civil, economic, political, and social rights over a long timespan, Steven L. B. Jensen questions the historical accuracy of too stark of a distinction. At the crossroads of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics, however, leaders of liberal democracies insisted that the political and civil rights of the individual were the most important in the universal package, while socialist states emphasized socioeconomic rights (the right to education, the right to work, the right to development) that could benefit individuals as part of their collective belonging, thus furthering the cause of the socialist revolution.

Arguing that the prioritization of a right (or a set of rights) over others was reflective, not only of Cold War tensions between East and West, but also of the power dynamics accompanying decolonization, Barbara Keys’s chapter on the hierarchies of rights sets the stage. The reordering of rights priorities has persisted even beyond the Cold War’s end, as ongoing battles about geopolitical positioning and the distribution of economic resources. Hierarchies constantly change in the evolution of rights.

Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp discuss regional rights projects through which Latin American and African state and non-state actors tried, with limited success, to position their regions competitively in a politically and economically decolonizing world, even as European regional rights projects shored up the political and economic sovereignty of European states, both at home and in overseas territories. While regional projects invested human rights with local meanings, which was key to their acceptance and adoption across regions, they mostly failed to create the world of non-domination that postcolonial states pursued.

Taking up different traditions, although also starting out with the 1940s UNESCO survey of philosophical ideas, Jessica Whyte provides a panorama of more skeptical voices about either the idea of human rights or the movements around it or both. One question for anyone reading these chapters in order is whether historians have accumulated more information about or richer interpretations of forms of human rights politics between past and present than either philosophical or critical commentators have grasped.

Yet Michael Cotey Morgan cautions that it was not a seamless alignment. The three ideological agendas orienting the Cold War international politics of human rights were those promoted by state representatives of liberal democracies, communists, and postcolonial nationalists. Alliances between these three approaches to rights were malleable, especially in the non-aligned “Third World.” While socialist and postcolonial states emphasized socioeconomic over individual political and civil rights, many developing states shared the American view that international human rights must not task the state with economic responsibilities toward its citizens. In the Cold War context, the principle on which all states could agree was the protection of state sovereignty, although, beyond the principle of non-interference so problematic to rights protections, no consensus existed on how to measure sovereignty.

This chapter features a broad spectrum of voices of the 1960s which all, if to varying degrees, used the normative framework of human rights in their growing criticisms of global inequalities: from pan-Africanists to the 1960s Popes to development economist Barbara Ward to other key figures in the UN community of ideas. Building upon new research on the global history of human rights, the chapter demonstrates that human rights were deployed to criticize global material inequality; that their protagonists were concerned with distributive justice; and that it was a long quest to defend economic and social human rights. Global inequalities, including those pertaining to racism and empire, were increasingly unjustifiable – to some extent in the very light of the growing legitimacy of human rights. It was a decade in which international economic and social human rights acquired a hitherto unparalleled legitimacy with the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The chapter sheds new light on figures such as Barbara Ward, the 1960s Popes, Ralph Bunche, and UNESCO official Malcolm Adiseshiah.

This chapter focuses on the history of human rights thinking mainly in the aftermath of the founding of the United Nations. It focuses primarily on international jurist Hersch Lauterpacht and secondarily on political scientist Arthur Holcombe. Whereas the 1948 UDHR has received much attention in human rights historiography, the chapter tells a story less told of how key intellectuals at the time grappled with international economic and social human rights. Little studied in the scholarly literature that have mainly focused on Lauterpacht’s legacy in inventing the legal concept of “crimes against humanity,” the chapter argues that his thinking on the international protection of human rights in 1950 was a nuanced, qualified, and careful, yet uncompromising defense of economic and social rights. Ultimately, while Lauterpacht’s defense of human rights mainly relied on the all-important negative principle of safeguarding individuals against the state – a protection from evil and harm that the contemporary order had blatantly failed to secure in the case of the Holocaust – it also entailed a more positive principle of facilitating human flourishing.

Whereas political and intellectual debates about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have received considerable scholarly attention, the intellectual history of international economic and social human rights in the 1950s remains an understudied topic. This chapter investigates this history, zooming in upon Ralph Bunche, Gunnar Myrdal, and Moses Moskowitz, and mapping their main arguments in favor of economic and social human rights. Within the domineering horizon of the global Cold War, they argued in favor of internationalizing economic and social human rights, even if their chances of success, admittedly, looked very slim. It was a human rights advocacy that included a criticism of material inequality. This advocacy flowed from several actors in various parts of the UN – from Bunche’s and Myrdal’s UN leadership positions preoccupied, respectively, with political conflicts and decolonization and economic development, to Moskowitz representing the Jewish minority at the UN and dedicated solely to human rights advocacy. Little noted in the scholarly literature, economic, and social human rights had some degree of salience within the burgeoning discourses on development too.

This chapter nuances the widespread view that human rights became the world’s global morality in the post–Cold War era. Investigating examples from international human rights law and intellectual history, it demonstrates that economic and social human rights did not come to enjoy the same status as civil and political rights. The mid-1970s to the 1980s was a period of frustration for economic and social human rights. Within a few years, hopes for a more egalitarian international world order with international obligations to promote economic and social human rights were shattered. Major factors were the dynamics of postcolonialism, the global Cold War and state power logics, and neoliberalism. Partly as a testimony to this, intellectuals such as Amartya Sen were concerned with basic rights. The post–Global Cold War period was marked by a premature sentiment of human rights triumphalism, though there were important efforts to strengthen economic and social human rights. As witnessed from the backlashes against these rights in the twenty-first century, their wider legitimacy and influence has remained much weaker than their advocates have hoped for.

This chapter analyzes the development of discourses on human rights and on inequality from 1962 until 1974 through the lens of Manouchehr Ganji, an Iranian human rights scholar and UN Special Rapporteur. Where other scholars have examined Ganji’s report The Widening Gap from 1973 with a key focus upon its impact within the UN, this chapter contextualizes the report in three novel ways, bringing in his 1962 doctoral dissertation not previously studied in the research literature; connecting it to how inequality became a major theme in the late 1960s and early 1970s broadly across development discourse, and to how human rights increasingly were deployed to denounce inequality; and, finally, by discussing these developments with regard to recent discussions of the historical relationships between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. Crucially, beyond the singularity of the one individual studied most in this chapter stands a much more general and pertinent point: The human rights project in 1973 was an ambitious anti-inequality project. It was a structural approach to human rights, aiming at undoing deeper within- and between-nation inequalities.

This chapter analyzes discourses on universal economic and social human rights and social democracy in connection with intellectuals discussing the American and British war aims of World War II. It was an age of major societal transformations: the socialization of work due to industrial capitalism; experiences of authoritarian ideologies emerging out of, inter alia, extreme inequality; and nascent uproars against racism and imperialism. Human rights were part of moral discourses on equality and social justice in the aftermath of the Great Depression and critiques of laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter details how Ralph Bunche and George Herbert Wells championed a vision of social democracy and human rights. Bunche and Wells intervened in wartime when many intellectuals across the political and religious spectrum would write of human rights. Key intellectual actors increasingly referred to a new political “space” of “the world,” and some were redefining “democracy” as a “world” and a “social” democracy. Revisiting their thinking allows for a more detailed reconstruction of their argumentation, including on how, specifically, they defended economic and social human rights.

Advocates of institutional economics in history have pointed to the adoption of systems of rights inspired by economic liberalism as a major factor behind inequalities of development. This chapter assesses the claim’s validity in the nineteenth century, when legal reforms grounded in liberal economic theory – most importantly the securing of exclusive private property rights – swept first Europe and its colonial offshoots and then the rest of the world. It considers the intellectual origins of such legal changes, their revolutionary implementation in the European world, their enforcement often by means of empire elsewhere, and the retreat from economic liberalism at the end of the century. Theories of development based on institutional economics are right to stress the extent of legal changes ushered in by economic liberalism. But adopting a social and political perspective on the new economic rights of the nineteenth century imposes several nuances. First, outside the anglophone world, liberal economic rights were neither the product nor the precursor of liberal political institutions: the adoption of free market rules was more often the result of revolutions from above or imperial rule. Second, liberal economic rights were granted selectively. Even in the European world, those of women remained significantly restricted, while in colonial worlds a very large share of Indigenous populations was excluded. Third, when faced with some adverse effects of unfettered competition and under the influence of new nationalist and socialist ideas, lawmakers in the last decades of the century began to temper liberal economic rights to protect national producers, small business owners, and industrial or agricultural workers. Contrary to the sanguine interpretation derived from institutional economics, the triumph of liberal economic rights did not entail that of political liberty, it chiefly benefited wealthy European males, and it lasted only a few decades. Private property may not have been theft, but nor was it the infallible elixir of economic development.

This chapter introduces the two types of rights in copyright : economic and moral rights. The chapter considers to what extent these rights are rights of property (the conceptual question).

The Colombian Constitutional Court has decisively undertaken the role of guaranteeing the normative force of economic and social rights. It has devised several tools to that effect, among them a test to evaluate regressive measures. This chapter examines rulings that review statutory norms in the abstract, before arguments that denounce them as illegitimate retrogressions in the enjoyment of social and economic rights. These claims are assessed by applying what we call the “integrated regression test.” The chapter establishes the meaning, structure, operation and efficacy of this test, which uses proportionality analysis as an allocation method. It dissects how it operates to safeguard rights when their minimum core or preexisting associated benefits are withdrawn. The integrated regression test proves to be a strong and complex scrutiny, even if not completely unified in its use, with a wide range of singularities and a tendency to be more protective of social rather than economic rights.