The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

62 Human Rights, Values and Choice
expensive services, more housing and a better environment
and what degree of central government control is
appropriate. Whatever the answers, in recent years
central government financial controls have throttled the
supply of new houses and together with the sale of
council housing stock, have much diminished the ability
of councils to provide housing.
The History of the Concept of Social and Economic
Rights
I must briefly refer to development of the concept of
economic and social rights. German thinkers believe that
ideas about the right to work came from Grotius,
Hobbes, their exponent, Pufendorf (1632-1694) who
expanded Natural Law doctrine and a broad concept of
the right to property, Locke and the French economist
and administrator, Turgot (1727-1781). These ideas were
taken up by the French Physiocrats, Quesnay (1694-
1774) and the Abbe Morellet (1729-1819). Tocqueville, in
his diatribe against the philosophes and economic theorists,
quotes Morellet's 1755 Code of Nature, advocating the
right to be provided with work, community of property,
absolute equality and communal uniform state education
from the age of five. 11 Turgot has been credited with
inventing the concept of the right to work because of an
Edict he drew up in 1776 as Comptroller-General for
Louis XVI. The Edict would have substituted a money
tax on land owners in lieu of compulsory labour by
peasants on roads (the corvee royal), stating that labourers
had the right to work for themselves rather than for the
benefit of landowners. Rhetoric is not the preserve of
liberals and those opposed to universal poll tax: in