Fifty years ago in 1948, the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration of the ideas of enlightenment in the 20^th century had great importance but of course could not solve the problem to enforce these rights all over the globe. After a certain time it also turned out that even the interpretation of these rights differs – using human right rhetoric sometimes was part of tactics, and in other cases was totally ignored in the main current political discourse.

Several articles of this issue of Eszmélet address the question of human rights, especially social rights and also present day social reforms. We continue to deal with topics discussed in earlier issues – the ecological crisis and connections between culture and the system change. First in our quarterly we publish a stage play, of which author is a sociologist publishing in earlier issues (for instance in the previous one). We commemorate the shortly deceased philosopher Imre Marton by publishing one of his last works.

Table of contents

1. Bánfalvi István, Németh György, Szigeti Péter, Krausz Tamás : Social rights and social reforms
2. Szigeti Péter : A foundation for the nature of human rights
3. Andor László : Stabilisation and human rights
4. Kondorosi Ferenc : On economic and social rights
5. Eszmélet : Acta Humana
6. krg : Voluntary army
7. Szabó Miklós : Pension reforms
8. Dömény János : One thousand days of socialist government in Chile
9. Alan Freeman : The myth of fre trade: The role of GATT and the WTO in the world economy
10. Elmar Altvater : The order of rational world rule
11. Stephen Eric Bonner : Limits of metatheory
12. Sándor Karikó : What is beyond capital?
13. Magyar Jenő : Popular self-criticism
14. Garai László : Theses on moderniosation, human capital and socialism
15. Marton Imre : Do not forget the wetched of the earth!
16. Ludmila Bulavka : Gone with the tide
17. James Petras : The Velvet Revolution (The story of Govel Havel)