In a speech two years later, his divisions follow the three watchwords of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
They are fundamentally civil and political in nature: They serve negatively to protect the individual from excesses of the state.
Second-generation human rights are related to equality and began to be recognized by governments after World War II.
They impose upon the government the duty to respect and promote and fulfill them, but this depends on the availability of resources.
Third-generation human rights are those rights that go beyond the mere civil and social, as expressed in many progressive documents of international law, including the 1972 Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and other pieces of generally aspirational "soft law".
Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, has argued that second- and third-generation human rights serve as an attempt to cloak political goals, which the majority may well agree are good things in and of themselves, in the language of rights, and thus grant those political goals inappropriate connotations.
19th century philosopher Frederic Bastiat summarized the conflict between these negative and positive rights by saying: M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity."
[26] Economist Friedrich Hayek has argued that the second generation concept of "social justice" cannot have any practical political meaning: No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about ...
In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust.
[27]New York University School of Law professor of law Jeremy Waldron has written in response to critics of the second-generation rights: In any case, the argument from first-generation to second-generation rights was never supposed to be a matter of conceptual analysis.
"[28]Hungarian socialist and political economist Karl Polanyi made the antithetical argument to Hayek in the book The Great Transformation.
Polanyi wrote that an uncontrolled free market would lead to repressive economic concentration and then to a co-opting of democratic governance that degrades civil rights.