The Pre-Institutional Groundwork of Social Rights in Kant: An Interpretative Path

The paper attempts to provide a comprehensive overview about one of the less explored issue within both the political philosophy and the philosophy of law in Kant, namely the traces and the “groundwork” of the Social Rights’ sphere. The paper focuses first on the particular status that social rights possess and have possessed in the light of their intellectual genealogy and their intrinsically problematic content (§ 1). Next, it examines how Kant related to this broader picture in the text that deals with the question of rights most directly, namely the first part of the "Metaphysics of Morals". Beside the most influent interpretation – which shares the opinion about a defence of conservative elements by the author – a specific attention is here devoted to the innovative and progressive elements of his theory about the social rights’ sphere, that have been often misrecognized and underestimated (§ 2). The paper explores thus the foundation of social rights as understood by Kant (and hinted at in the "Metaphysics of Morals"), turning to the work which is more conceptually connected to the former: The "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" (§ 3). For sure, this is a sort of pre-institutional and generative theoretical place, in which a relevant part of the conceptual vocabulary for the spheres of moral and law – namely, the interconnected universes of duties and rights – is foreseen and addressed. It is here, within the discourse related to the fundaments of the moral and juridical community, that certain traces of an innovative and “latent” groundwork for the social rights and, at the same time, for the social change can be found (§ 4).