Charles Walton: Social Rights in the Longue durée: Between Redistribution and Abundance

The Institute of History is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Charles Walton (University of Warwick), which will trace the development of social rights across the longue durée, from Aquinas to Artificial Intelligence.

Abstract:
As historians have recently shown, economic and social rights have a much longer history than previously thought. Far from being ‘second generation rights’ invented in the twentieth century, they stretch back to – and even pre-date – the revolutionary human rights of the Enlightenment and Age of Revolutions of the eighteenth century. This lecture will discuss how social rights since late medieval times have been caught in a tension between two broader discourses: redistributive justice and theories of abundance. Given the politically vexed nature of redistributive justice, theories of abundance have often been invoked as an alternative. Occasionally in this long history, however, theories of abundance have been yoked to the language of rights. The lecture concludes by reflecting on Artificial Intelligence and how it is reshaping this historical tension between redistribution and promises of abundance.

Charles Walton is Reader in History at the University of Warwick, where he has been Director of the Eighteenth Century Centre and of the European History Research Centre. His research focuses on the French Revolution and human rights, especially free speech and social rights. He is co-editor, with Steven L. B. Jensen, of Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge, 2022). He recently co-written, with Charly Coleman, ‘Abstract and Embodied: The Political Economy of the French Revolution’ in French History (2024).