Keynote II – Charles Walton

Between Redistribution and Abundance: Social Rights in the Longue Durée

Charles Walton (University of Warwick)

1 July 2026, 16:00
University of Groningen, Academy Building
Senaatskamer

Abstract

This keynote traces a long history of social rights with France at its centre, focusing on a persistent tension between two imagined ways of securing individual well-being: redistribution and abundance. From medieval doctrines of necessity and subsistence to Enlightenment political economy and the French Revolution, claims to social rights were shaped—and constrained—by competing assumptions about scarcity, growth and obligation. The revolutionary moment, in particular, brought these tensions into sharp relief, as social rights were alternately grounded in market-generated abundance and pressed into more explicitly redistributive forms. Rather than telling a story of linear progress, the lecture emphasises ruptures, reversals, and recurring controversies around justiciability and duties. In teasing out this tension between redistribution and abundance across time, within and beyond France, it reflects on why social rights have proven both resilient and fragile—and on what their past can tell us about their possible futures in the age of artificial intelligence.