Afterword

Abstract

If the ‘Paineite’ approach associates the rights of man with popular sovereignty, together with social welfare and decent wages, the ‘Spencean’ approach insists that political revolution needs to be accompanied by social revolution, and remedial measures by efforts to seek out and transform the roots of injustice. It is, of course, the former that has been most important in shaping the course of history (including the history of human rights), and that is most familiar today. This Afterword gives brief consideration to the question of what it might mean to recover the Spencean alternative in a world of ‘new enclosures’ and ‘new commons’.