Abstract
This book offers a highly relevant introduction for readers interested in connections between social rights and human welfare in the sense that it captures how the well-being of citizens may be fulfilled through the realisation of social rights. Social Rights and Human Welfare is clearly addressed to an international readership in the field of social policy and the applied social sciences. It covers deeply rooted questions concerning emerging welfare systems of the global south as well as changes impacting established welfare states of the global north. Dean’s book builds on his 30 years in academia as a gifted researcher and teacher, which was preceded by a 12-year career as a welfare rights worker in one of London’s most deprived multicultural neighbourhoods. Furthermore, his new contribution can be perceived as a very systematic, careful and critical revision of his previous work.
The book comprises three parts. The first is focused on social rights in theory and considers the origins of social rights. It explores the ways in which human needs can be redefined and translated into rights and tackles the failures of social rights in the face of poverty and immense social inequalities. Moreover, the ethical foundations of social rights, including ideas of collective responsibility, are discussed and a range of ideological and theoretical critiques of the social rights concept are addressed and illuminated. Part two is concerned with social rights in practice, providing a comparative examination of their development in both the global north and the global south. More specifically, this section of the book deals with rights to livelihood, to human services and to housing, and it discusses mechanisms by which social rights might be enforced. Part three deals with how we might begin to re-think social rights, and outlines possible future directions. Social rights are first located in relation to recent international measures intended to promote social development and to alleviate global poverty.
In the concluding chapter, Dean explicitly engages with an attempt to reconsider and reclaim ‘the future for social rights as meaningful and effective social constructs’ (p. 147) that can be constitutive of social practice. In that vein, he presents a radical new ‘post-Marshallian’ theory of social rights rooted in diverse forms of sociality and negotiation. This approach emphasises ‘the dialogical nature of social rights and the idea that they are negotiated within relations of interdependency, at a variety of sites and levels … local or global’ (p. 165). The key argument of the book is that social rights may be understood as articulations of human need, and that the full realisation of social rights requires, therefore, ‘the expansion of human solidarity’ (p. 156).
Social Rights and Human Welfare not only provides a significant and very relevant basic reading for anyone concerned with issues of citizenship, social rights, human well-being and rights-based approaches within critical social policy. It is also a provocative book for readers seeking to engage with rather complex, if not confusing, debates in times when social rights have tended to be drained of a distinctive purpose and primarily deployed as rhetorical devices circulating around ambiguous notions of ‘social justice’.
The author pertinently articulates critical arguments in relation to different and even controversial standpoints in social policy making and in social policy research. Whilst taking an explicit, yet nuanced position and exhibiting progressive views, Dean enables readers to question and revisit taken-for-granted ideas. This book may well become something of a classic within the literature of critical social policy.