ABSTRACT
This book has introduced two rather different ways in which our understanding of social rights has come about. The idea of social rights first crystallised with the development of capitalist welfare states in the global North and through an account of this process furnished – largely after the event – by T. H. Marshall. Marshall suggested that social rights had emerged as the culmination of the story by which modern citizenship had evolved. Social rights were a tangible product of capitalist development: we had made them. A related but different idea of social rights crystallised on the international stage as the world emerged from the second of the two world wars that had occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. Social rights, it was decided, were an essential component of our human rights, and they are necessary to peace and social order: we had discovered them.
