From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Sun Apr 04 2004 - 13:14:37 MDT
Of course, the struggle of the people for the material essentials -- either against nature or against each other -- can be traced way back into the past. However, the following well-crafted first paragraph of a book review argues that it was the idea of Rights in the 18th century which set the stage for identifying the poverty problem as real-world inequality in the 19th century.
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/04/kattel.html
Review of "Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' "
"When the significance of poverty was realised”, writes Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, “the stage was set for the nineteenth century.” (2001, 116) Indeed, the transformation from the “Age of Rights” (Dagger 1989, 301) of the late 18th century – exemplified by Declaration of Independence in 1776 in the United States and Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens in 1789 in France – into, in the words of Hegel, the “bürgerliche Gesellschaft” of the 19th century brought social problems to the forefront of politics as well as of theory. A society of equals by rights necessarily laid bare the existing inequalities in wealth, birth and education. As Lorenz von Stein argued in 1850, the development of the constitutional state and thus of human rights was bound to change the very nature of society and state into one dominated and legitimized by social demands and their satisfaction. (See, e.g., 1959, vol. 3, 335-338) It is thus not a coincidence that the ideas of culture and education evolve out of
this socio-political context as counterparts to rights.
<snip>
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