Beyond Rights

The 1964 Civil Rights Act certainly deserves a shower of golden anniversary tributes. Thanks to what Clay Risen, in his new book about its passage, calls “the Bill of the Century,” most Americans now assume and most welcome the fact that restaurants and hotels cannot turn people away because of their race, that women can apply for the same jobs as men, and that colleges that practice discrimination can’t receive federal funds.

With a big push from progressive social movements, the law also helped catalyze a “rights revolution” that continues to inspire millions of Americans and infuriate others. Mexican Americans, disabled people, homosexuals, and women from every kind of background claimed their own right to economic opportunity, political influence, and cultural respect in language borrowed both from the 1964 act and from the black power movement, which emerged later in the decade. This expansion of rights—of freedoms, both individual and collective—has been the greatest achievement of the American left since the Second World War.

But perhaps it’s time to advance the idea of responsibility as well as rights. Talk of freedom from unjust authorities and traditions cannot address some of the most serious problems that currently face the United States and much of the world: the exploitation of workers and the poor, the rigged casino that is finance capital, the accelerating degradation of the environment. Celebrants of the autonomous, profit-max...