This chapter revisits the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and some thinkers who addressed social rights in its time, arguing that it is best understood historically as a charter for social citizenship. There is little evidence that the UDHR was intended – let alone noticed – as a call for supranational protection or a lodestar for non-governmental pressure. Rather, the UDHR was a template for a new kind of state, thus both national and governmental in its implications. This unprecedented new kind of state, birthed by the Second World War and ultimately consecrated around the world, afforded social protections and perhaps even egalitarian distribution. The restoration of the UDHR to its time poses new questions about how it was that human rights could indeed become at a later date so strongly associated with the supranational and non-governmental even as any commitment to distributive equality evaporated. Put in terms of a formula, the UDHR is an artefact of a pre-neo-liberal age that found itself celebrated in a neo-liberal one – but only once it was reinvented first.

This chapter offers a conceptual framework for better understanding the long and often misrepresented history of social rights. It begins by debunking the common notion that social rights are ‘second-generation rights’ – that they are recent additions to ‘core’ civil and political rights that stretch back to the Enlightenment. After historicising this myth, the authors sketch out the long history of social rights presented in this volume, situating their origins across a wide range of sources: religion, liberalism, socialism, decolonisation, biopolitics, among others. Understanding the chronic precariousness of social rights, they argue, requires understanding their entanglements with notions of charity, justice, equality and, above all, ‘duties’ and ‘obligations’. The history of social rights, they insist, is inseparable from the problem of obligation – a problem with philosophical, legal and cultural dimensions. They conclude by linking the history of social rights to broader struggles over inequality, particularly those generated by class, race, gender, colonialism and globalisation.