Emancipating human rights

Capitalism and the common good

Bibliographic Data

ID5794012
AuthorsMargot E Salomon (London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume36
Issue4
Pages857-877
Publication date2023-06-29
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLeiden Journal of International Law (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0922-1565 • E-ISSN: 1478-9698
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0922156523000316
OpenAlexW4382560121
LanguageEN
Citations received8

This article begins with a study of the political economy of welfare capitalism to demonstrate how the private quest for profit was never going to be undermined by the advance of socio-economic rights. Contrary to the conventional view among human rights lawyers, capital draws power from its rights or welfarism. It is in recognizing the role that socio-economic rights play in serving capitalism that the field of international law concerned with structurally transformative human rights can begin to explore how socio-economic rights inhibit alternative forms of social organization. This work then turns to recovering property rights through a study of recent evictions and housing rights case law of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that problematizes structural inequities and calls the financialized capitalist system into question. Next this work investigates radical legal positivism in international indigenous rights jurisprudence for how it transcends the private ownership of indigenous lands and control over the means of production. The social function of property rights is then revisited and extended, drawing to a close an article that unearths how socio-economic rights might yet emancipate people from capitalist property relations, alter the underlying structure of the economy, and, in time, sever its concordance with the capitalist welfare state

Social rights · Human Rights and Development · Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Law

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access