Abstract
As we have already seen, some thinkers, including Maurice Cranston and many Western liberals, make the argument that to be effective the number of human rights should be very constricted. The categorization is also important. Human rights should be (1) civil and political, and (2) individual, that is, pertaining only to individuals and not to groups or collectivities. Thus, while the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is acceptable, there is widespread suspicion in this quarter that the covenant of the same year on economic, social, and cultural rights opens up a Pandora’s Box and has nothing to do with human rights properly understood.
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Notes
While the ILO was created by the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919, it is now the oldest specialized agency of the United Nations. See Elizabeth McKeon, Worker Rights in the Global Economy (New York: The United Nations Association of the United States and The Business Council for the United Nations, 1999), 20–4.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
New York Times, April 21, 1992, A1. The data for 1989 is the latest as of this writing on the disparity in wealth holding for families by five wealth-holding segments. But there are statistical indications that the disparity has gotten even worse since 1989. First, “the percentage of wealth held by the top 1.0 percent and the top 0.5 percent of the population [individuals here rather than families] did not change significantly [from 1989–1995].” Barry Johnson, “Personal Wealth, 1995,” SOI Bulletin Federal Reserve Bank, Winter 1999/2000, 70.
Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), 21–3.
Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
“The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color. Those who hope that the Europeans will ever be amalgamated with the Negroes appear to me to delude themselves.... slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable. Whoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived that in those parts of the Union in which the Negroes are no longer slaves they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known. Thus it is in the United States that the prejudice which repels the Negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and equality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the laws of the country.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 358–60.
Friedrich von Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, Vol 2. of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 189.
Adetoun O. Ilumoka, “African Women’s Economic, Social, And Cultural Rights-Toward a Relevant Theory and Practice,” in Rebecca Cook, ed., Human Rights of Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 311.
Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (London: Verso, 1983), 262
Daniel Singer’s Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 179.
On these cooperatives, see Edward S. Greenberg, Workplace Democracy: The Political Effects of Participation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
See Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb, Cooperation at Work: The Mondragon Experience (London: Heinemann, 1985)
William Foote Whyte, Making Mondragon: the Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca, NY: Institute of Labor Relations Press, 1988).
Peter Jay, “The Workers’ Co-operative Economy,” in Alasdair Clayre, ed., The Political Economy of Co-operation and Participation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 40.
Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
See also the same argument in Charles Lindblom, “Democracy and the Economy,” in his Democracy and the Market System (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1988), 115–35.
See Charles A. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
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© 2003 A. Belden Fields
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Fields, A.B. (2003). Toward a Political Economy of Human Rights. In: Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109254_6
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