Social Rights and Markets
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Author | Emilios Christodoulidis |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663915617860 |
| Subject Matter | Dialogue and Debate |
Dialogue and Debate
Social & Legal Studies
2015, Vol. 24(4) 595–636
Social Rights and
ª The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
Markets: A Debate
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663915617860
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Contradiction
Emilios Christodoulidis
University of Glasgow, UK
When we organized a series of colloquia on the theme of social rights and markets
in Glasgow in 2012, it was with the explicit intention to explore whether such a
relationship might be conceptualized at all other than as competition and how that
‘competition’ might usefully be theorized. Can social rights effectively, if at all,
mediate the operation of markets in the direction of effective regulation, or are
they only ever modes of redressing the effects of market distributions and the
increase in inequality that markets generate? If the latter, do social rights provide
effective ways of redressing such effects, or, given a certain modus operandi and a
globalized economy, do they make social protection more costly for those who
most need it? Are there other ways of tempering market-produced and market-
enhanced social inequality, or do social rights give us adequate leverage? And sig-
nificantly, in what sense might social rights inform critical legal theory and critical
intervention?
If this inquiry was intended in the direction of an adequate theorization of the rela-
tionship between social rights and markets, Fernando Atria prompted us to look at
how that relationship is played out in terms of the competition within the rights cate-
gory itself. For Atria, individual rights (negative freedom rights) and social rights
(positive freedom rights) cannot be conceived or thematized on a continuum, except
at the cost of hollowing out social rights or collapsing them in a way that ‘de-socia-
lizes’ them. Successes in securing their justiciability, he claims, are nothing but tooth-
less victories at best, at worst a sign of how their political leverage has been wasted.
The...
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