Abstract: At a crucial juncture in his famous lectures on “Citizenship and Social Class,” English sociologist T. H. Marshall explained that the new social rights he associated with the invention of the twentieth-century welfare state were in fact a blast from the past—a bequest from the moral economy to a later age grappling with political economy run amok. Marshall’s celebrated theory of social rights that followed provides one aperture from which to intervene in a dispute brewing between starkly alternative views of the relevance today
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Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity Gunnar Myrdal New York: Harper and Row, 1958 “Considering that he is Secretary-General of the Economic Commission for Europe and hence immersed in European problems,” one of the early reviewers wrote of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s An International Economy (1956), “one of the striking features . . . is that so much of it is directed toward problems of underdeveloped areas.”1 And just as he completed that work he was already on the road to
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Congrats to Miriam Ticktin, Humanity editorial collective member, who has been selected for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Social Sciences.
Joseph Slaughter, one of the members of Humanity‘s editorial collective, published “We’re in the Middle of a Corporate Civil Rights Movement” on Talking Points Memo. Check it out. Among other things, Slaughter notes that while people “often talk of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements as building on the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement,” corporations “may be the biggest beneficiaries of abolition and the civil rights struggle—as the successful pushback against the Indiana RFRA will ultimately prove.” As Slaughter points out, this has a history,
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The Wall Street Journal runs my brief review of Jens Ohlin’s book contending that there is.
Congrats to David Singh Grewal (Yale) and Jedediah Purdy (Duke) who have curated and introduced a major new dossier in Law and Contemporary Problems on law and neoliberalism. The table of contents with links to full-text articles is here.
This essay-review revisits political theorist Judith Shklar’s classic Legalism, with an eye to the uses of its arguments in the era of the International Criminal Court. After reviewing her jurisprudence, the essay takes up her defense of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, showing that it is mainly her critical arguments about international criminal law that survive today. Then the essay goes on to examine further features of her doctrines, including the implications of her engagement with the so-called Tokyo trial for Japanese war criminals for the typically postcolonial setting of international criminal law today.
Given the current interest in "human dignity" -- which I have canvassed elsewhere -- a number of people are interested in why it became canonized in the first place.
Crossposted from the new blog Humanitarianism and Human Rights:
This week The Nation published my essay on the origins and trajectory of human dignity, in which I engage absorbing and accomplished books by Michael Rosen and Jeremy Waldron.
