Getting Rights Right

This period focus on a simple yet seemingly intractable paradox – Why does Portugal, the country with the highest degree of social rights constitutionalization in the world, and approaching the European Union average on social expenditure, remain one of the most unequal in the OECD, just behind Mexico and Turkey? This is the puzzle he wishes to solve in the next few years with Mónica Brito Vieira and Pedro Ramos Pinto.

In his historical studies of the political roots of American philosophical pragmatism, Carreira da Silva has tried to show the extent to which the classical republican critique of modern liberal conceptions of state sovereignty has survived in the idiom of American pragmatists such as G.H. Mead and especially John Dewey. First in his 2002 book Virtue and Democracy: A Study in Republican Ideas (originally published in Portuguese; translated to Spanish in 2009), and later in his 2008 “Bringing Republican Ideas Back Home: The Dewey-Laski Connection” (History of European Ideas, 35), he explored the tension between (republican) virtues and (liberal) rights from the perspective of the pragmatist non-dualistic, radical democratic political philosophy. This historical survey into virtues and rights has provided Carreira da Silva with the basic template for the neo-pragmatist social theory of rights he is currently trying to develop.

Rights are to be conceived of as neither a priori idealist elements, based upon a universal conception of human nature, nor simply as social constructs. Rather, he conceives of human rights as socially constituted political objects, which constrain political action as much as they enable it. From their emergence as collectively imagined political objects, focus of intense political struggle and competition, rights rapidly become – usually through constitutionalization – valuable liberties, entitlements and guarantees that legitimate political authorities distribute, guarantee or deny. His historical and theoretical research on rights has been awarded substantial funding in competitive applications.

He is currently the Principal Investigator of a research team that was awarded a 100.000 Euros research grant to study the causes and consequences of social rights constitutionalization: “Broken Promises. The Political Origins of Socioeconomic Inequality in Portugal, 1960-2010” (PTDC/CPJ-CPO/101290/2008). He began working on this project in Jerusalem in the summer of 2009 with S.N. Eisenstadt, first presented it in the Minda de Gunzburg Center at Harvard later that year, and the first findings was published in book form in 2010 as The Constituent Moment (originally in Portuguese, with Mónica Brito Vieira). In 2011, Carreira da Silva supervised the Portuguese translation of Eisenstadt’s The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity, whose comparative historical approach to rights and revolutions has impacted his thinking substantially. Cambridge University Press expressed interest in this project and Filipe Carreira da Silva is now working on the manuscript proposal.

References

 

Workshops

  • 2011. ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, St. Gallen, Switzerland 12-16 Aprill. Co-organizer (with Mónica Brito Vieira and Pedro Ramos Pinto) of the workshop: “Redistribution Paradoxes: the Politics of Welfare”.

Papers

  • (forthcoming). A Social Theory of Rights.
  • (forthcoming). Getting Rights Right. Explaining Social Rights Constitutionalization in Revolutionary Portugal. With Mónica Brito Vieira.
  • 2012. Os Portugueses Perante o Estado Providência. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais (colecção Atitudes Sociais dos Portugueses). Organização.
  • 2012. Direitos Iguais, Vidas Desiguais. As Atitudes dos Portugueses sobre Desigualdade. Barómetro da Qualidade da Democracia, ICS-UL. With Mónica Brito Vieira and Susana Cabaço. [document (pdf)] As reported in Público (05-02-2012).
  • 2011. Eisenstadt, S.N. As Grandes Revoluções e as Civilizações da Modernidade. Lisboa: Edições 70. Organização e introdução. Tradução de Marta Castelo Branco. [online]
  • 2010. O Momento Constituinte. Os Direitos Sociais na Constituição. Coimbra: Almedina. With Mónica Brito Vieira. [online]
  • 2010. “Democracia Deliberativa. Reflexões sobre o Percurso Recente de uma Ideia.” In José Manuel Viegas (org.), A Qualidade da Democracia em Debate. Deliberação, Representação e Participação Políticas em Portugal e Espanha. Lisboa: Mundos Sociais.
  • 2009. “Plural Modernity. Changing Modern Institutional Forms: Disciplines and Nation-states.” Social Analysis. The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 53 (2). With Mónica Brito Vieira.
  • 2009. "Metamorfoses do Estado. Portugal e a Emergência do Estado Neo-social." In Renato Miguel do Carmo and João Rodrigues (eds.), Onde Pára o Estado? Políticas Públicas em Tempo de Crise. Lisboa: Edições Nelson de Matos: 19-51.