Social rights and the origins of the social constitution: From collective natural rights to the social state

Abstract This Foreword revisits the commonly understood origin story of social rights and the social constitution. It challenges the predominant thesis that social rights were a conceptual by-product of the rise of the welfare state. Instead, it argues that, in the nineteenth century, social rights—which have longer and deeper historical lineages than previously recognized—became a compelling register through which a new imaginary of a social state was constructed. It argues that social rights ideas emerged as “collective natural rights” and were used to articulate a concept of the state as a public power that represented the interests of the whole of society, not just the propertied, and to assert the state’s purpose in upholding the equal right of all to a fair share of the wealth produced by the social whole. For this reason, social rights played a distinctive role in the articulation of the transformative ambitions of revolutionary movements and post-colonial states. This Foreword concludes that recovering this historical understanding of social rights and the social constitution is valuable, and potentially useful, in an epoch of galloping inequality, intensifying concentrations of private wealth and power, and downward social mobility for many.