Reflections on the thesis that (natural) social rights preceded the creation of the social (welfare) state: Afterword to the Foreword by Nehal Bhuta

Abstract

This Afterword offers a philosophical engagement with Nehal Bhuta’s Foreword “Social Rights and the Origins of the Social Constitution” from the standpoint of Aristotelian–MacIntyrean virtue ethics, supplemented by Marx’s critique of capitalism. While endorsing Bhuta’s historical thesis—that natural social rights and their discourse preceded and helped constitute the modern welfare state—this Afterword argues that the language of rights is ethically and ontologically secondary. Rights emerge not as first principles of justice but as derivative claims arising from the breakdown of consent within social relations. The Afterword develops an alternative framework grounded in “activity,” “practice,” and “excellence” (aretē) as the foundational modes of human existence and cooperation. It then articulates two ethical-political principles: “consent,” rooted in the equal dignity of persons and constitutive of social justice, and “grace,” understood as the gratuitous gift and telos of a communist life, realizable only through excellence and shared flourishing. On this view, rights function as juridical responses to ruptured consent within capitalist societies that commodify human activity and privatize the commons. While Bhuta’s genealogy persuasively demonstrates the emancipatory role of natural social rights in resisting capitalist exclusion, such rights remain dependent on positive law and political power for their validity. This Afterword concludes that socialist justice—founded on merit and solidarity—prefigures a communist order of grace, in which the language of rights itself may ultimately wither away, replaced by relations grounded in consent, excellence, and the free gift.