From Duty to Rights Network
From Duties to Rights:
The ‘Correlativity’ Problem in Historical Perspective
Draft by Charles Walton and Nicolas Delalande
The following is a synthesis of our first network meeting, ‘From Duties to RightsLink opens in a new window’, held at the University of Warwick’s Venice Centre on April 3-4, 2025. Rather than summarising all the contributions (see programmeLink opens in a new window), it identifies some key themes and problems addressed during the meeting -- ones that might be woven into the study of various historical contexts going forward. These themes and problems, we hope, might serve as the basis of a comparative framework for the study of duties and their relationship to rights over the longue durée.
The most obvious point made throughout the workshop was that the history of duties has been understudied. This neglect, as Samuel Moyn pointed out (both in his talk and recent publications), is symptomatic of the ethos of our times, especially on the political left and libertarian right, which tends to foreground rights while casting a sceptical eye on duties. This scepticism is not only naïve (because an appreciation of duties can strengthen a progressive rights agenda and have always been fundamental to rights; it also obscures the importance of duties throughout the long history of rights.
Scholars in other disciplines have begun stressing the importance of duties to the advancement of human rights, notably, the works by Sandra Fredman, Henry Shue, Jeremy Waldron, Onora O’Neill and Kathryn Sikkink. Without duties, these theorists argue, rights are meaningless. But historians, and especially those working on the modern era, have largely neglected duties. In our prior research network on social rights, some of us sought to rectify this neglect by focusing on the ‘politics of obligation’. Our special issue of French History (Dec 2019) and anthology on Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (eds. Jensen and Walton, 2022) framed the long history of social rights, from the late medieval era to the present, as a perpetual struggle over duty-bearing. But the question of ‘duties’ and the politics of obligation extend beyond social rights.
Although our network should seek to uncover the historical significance duties in specific contexts and how they have shaped understandings of what belonging means, we should also go further by establishing a shared set of problems and methodological approaches. Contributions to collective works should be written with comparative history in mind, teasing out what is specific to certain contexts and what fits into broader historical patterns. A study of duties in Europe or Westernised nations should be framed in ways that invite comparisons with non-Western contexts. We should also consider ‘unequal duties’, the correlatives of unequal rights. This is how duties figured in late medieval natural law in Europe. Global comparisons will likely reveal that this was the case elsewhere as well.
Based on the workshop contributions, as well as the current literature on duties (such as it exists), we propose the following central problematic: we will explore the ever changing relationship between duties and rights in ethics, politics and society. More succinctly, we will focus on the correlativity problem in history.
In the West, the relationship between rights and duties has varied across time and space. In some contexts, duties have been emphasized over rights; in others, (such as our own times), the inverse is true, at least in public discourse, if not always in law or social practice. Why this variability? There have been occasions in history when theorists have tried to draw a strict correlation between the two, maintaining that every right has a corresponding duty. Some theorists have even gone so far as to collapse them into each other. In his Rights of Man (1791), for example, Thomas Paine justified the absence of ‘duties’ from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 by insisting on an inherent correspondence between the two: ‘A declaration of rights is, by reciprocity, a declaration of duties.’ Duties, therefore, did not need to be enumerated. The French revolutionaries of 1795 were not convinced of this. In drafting the Revolution's third constitution that year, the National Convention included a list of duties alongside rights.
Throughout history, the correlativity between rights and duties could not be taken for granted, as if they were two sides of a single coin, with every right having its corresponding duty. Questions of interdependence, causality (have duties given rise to rights or vice-versa?) and conditionality (the political or social factors) have had a bearing on the correlativity question. Are there historical patterns within all of this? For example, are there identifiable conditions under which duties have become more important than rights, have reshaped rights, or given rise to new rights -- and vice-versa? Or that duties are considered more of a ‘fixed variable’ giving rise to various articulations and re-articulations of rights? The nineteenth century, aside from certain revolutionary moments, marked a relative retreat of ‘rights talk'. Yet, duties-talk remained strong and likely played a role in the re-emergence of 'rights' talk in the early twentieth century. The late twentieth century appear to have inverted the nineteenth-century trend: 'rights talk' as far more prominent than 'duties talk' -- to the point that many scholars seem to be puzzled by why anyone would even consider the history of duties as a worthwhile topic of investigation. The tension between rights duties in colonial and metropolitan contexts strikes us as an especially fertile terrain to explore. How did imperial subjugation create tensions between how rights and duties were understood? How did the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 challenge imperial hierarchies? And what role did debates over 'duties' and 'duty-bearing' feed into the politics of de-colonisation?
Understanding the relationship between rights and duties in history offers a way of understanding how societies have tried to construct social relations. Duties, we believe, have served to reinforce hierarchies, but they have also been invoked to assert equality. Differences in how the rights-and-duties relation has been understood and enforced may point to divisions running through societies -- between classes, religions, races and ethnicities and genders. Social groups have defined themselves by the way they talk about and practice specific sets of duties. Moreover, duties have been invoked as a means of justifying certain forms of authority and for asserting new identities. For example, the Huguenots separated themselves from Catholics in the sixteenth century by managing the 'duty to give to the poor' differently. Poor relief had always been a Christian duty, but changes in the understanding of that duties and the need to reform the organisation of it underwrote the authority of Huguenot authorities. The right of Huguenot authorities was also grounded in the duty they undertook to protect the 'Godly' community from tyranny (Beza, Hotman). While today 'duties' are often seen as antithetical to rights -- as insidious ways to undermine or limit rights -- duties have historically been invoked to define new communities and liberate them from the control of others. Duties can be constitutive as well as conservative.
Clearly, the relationship between rights and duties has never been a foregone conclusion. The fact that so much ink has been spilled trying to nail down their relationship suggests that their relationship has been an ongoing problem -- one that can be historicised. The question for our network is whether we can discern patterns or trends in this history. Trends and patterns might be discovered in the texts of philosophers and jurists? They might also be found in the political struggles of the past. How were duties conceived of? What relation were they thought to have to rights? And how were duties invoked in those political struggles, and to what effect?
The question of correlativity may come into view in focusing on several of the themes proposed during the workshop:
-Moral frameworks, both religious and secular, with religious ethics persisting into the modern era. A consideration of ‘transcendental’ duties might be added to this. (Moyn, Serina, Philp)
-The role of ‘duties’ discourses in changing political orders (monarchical, republican, liberal, authoritarian, fascist, socialist); public policies and institutions (Pavan, Sustrova, Delalande)
-How duties figure in political economy: understandings of wealth production and circulation, economic agents and economic systems (McClure, Boscarello, Christiansen, Walton)
-How duties are conceived of on the 'universal' or 'natural' level versus how they are conceived of when circumscribed to citizenship (the nation state), to empires (with a subaltern class), or international associations (the United Nations). (Jensen)
-Reciprocity (and predatory reciprocity). How the rights/duties framework has structured hierarchical or balanced relations in society and politics (McClure, Walton)
-From the national to the transnational: international law, empire/colonialism, globalisation. (Moyn, McClure, Simpson, Jensen, Serina, Delalande, Jensen)
-Human and non-human parties to the rights/duties relationship (Simpson)
Several methodological approaches were advanced during the workshop.
Intellectual historical lens
As Moyn and Delalande pointed out, there is an intellectual history of duties to be recovered. While historians of early modern Europe have attended to the theme of duties, modern historians have largely neglected it. Moyn and Delalande stress the importance of Guiseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) but more might be done to trace his legacy. The literature on late medieval and early modern duties discourses might be synthesized and interpreted with an eye to the longue durée and modern period. Modern religious ethics and theology might also be given attention. Moyn has already uncovered the Christian origins of post-WWII human rights, but more could be done recover religious thought of the nineteenth century. Selina proposes to examine the Church’s stance on rights and duties during the Cold War. We may wish to incorporate Islamic, Confucian and Hindu understandings of duties – identifying pivotal thinkers in the shift to modernity.
An anthropological lens
Cultural anthropology offers conceptual tools for thinking through how societies manage claims and obligations. From Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1924) to David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (2014), anthropologists have shown how struggles over claims and obligations have turned on morality, politics and economic interests. An anthropological lens provides conceptual frameworks for comparing Western and non-Western contexts, which our network should seek to do, as Simpson and Christiansen are encouraging us to do.
The concepts of redistribution, reciprocity and recognition are also useful for thinking about the question of duties. Who is being recognised in the articulation of a duty: God, society, the individual? Do duties partake in the redistribution of resources or power (Walton and McClure)? And to the degree that rights and duties involve ‘reciprocal’ exchanges, are those exchanges based on hierarchy, equality or even predation?
The anthropological lens can be useful for examining modes of environmental care in imperial settings, where native and non-native value systems regarding claims and obligations interact, sometimes influencing each other, other times clashing. It might also help us think about rights and duties involving non-humans, or non-moral agents. How might we think about correlativity when one party is, say, a river or a forest? (The question becomes even more complicated when we consider AI, which will soon have agency.) Can the history of the correlativity problem offer useful insights for the future?
Storytelling
Mark Philp offered a fascinating framework for thinking about duties. He proposed thinking about rights and duties as situated along a continuum between coercion (imposed duties) and contract (duties voluntarily entered into by free agents) -- and between general duties (God's law or, in a secular vein, to maximise general utility) and specific duties created within contracts (the duty I owe you with respect to x at time y arising from previous arrangements or agreements). In between these two poles is where struggles over rights and duties have historically occurred. One way of dealing with those struggles has been to tell stories. Narratives help legitimise duties and routinise them into the culture. This approach to analysing duties in history opens up an area for literary scholars. Some have already linked eighteenth-century fictional narratives to the advent of human rights (Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights; Julie Ellison’s Cato’s Tears). It also opens up duties to be analysed from the perspective of the emotions: are duties the product of reason or feelings?
Policy, Law and Institutions
Several workshop contributions considered duties from the perspective of policymaking, laws and institutions (governmental and non-governmental, such as the Catholic Church and businesses). Research in this vein might try to uncover continuities and ruptures how conceptions of duties traverse times and places: for example, how health policies have persisted across political change from fascist and authoritarian regimes to socialist and liberal societies, as Sustrova and Pavan showed. This approach can highlight how ‘duties’ and ‘obligations’ have been re-adapted to different contexts but also different parts of the world through imperialism and globalisation. Boscarello recognises the influence of the post-WWII United States on the European business environment but also sees that influence limited by a specifically European social model.
The focus on policies, laws and institutions might attempt to frame analyses in ways that lend themselves to historical comparisons. What can the study of health or business policies tell us about the unstable relationship between rights and duties? What is historically specific and what fits into broader patterns? Philp’s interest in ‘duties of care’ might join up with with Pavan and Sustrova’s exploration of health policies.
Secondary themes
While focusing primarily on the correlativity problem, we might also explore some sub-themes. Questions of equality and power strike me as historically important and of ongoing relevance. We might also explore social status, ‘recognition’ practices and the distinction between individuals and the community.
Plan of Action
We intend to organise another meeting next spring. We’d like to broaden the team to include non-Western historians. South Asian historians would be ideal, given Gandhi’s famous emphasis on duties in responding to the West’s human rights project. Over the next year, we will consider how to structure collective publications: chronologically, geographically, thematically, or methodologically.
You will find attached to this webpage a working bibliography on duties. Please let us know of titles we can add to this. We are especially interested in historical studies, but key works in other disciplines, if they can be helpful to historians, are also welcome.