Dooyeweerd's Societal Sphere Sovereignty (2017 revision)

Social Rights in the Welfare State, 2016

Novos Estudos Jurídicos, 2021

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Politologický časopis - Czech Journal of Political Science

The paper analyses the current position of the welfare state and how it is reflected in the recent literature. It criticizes contributions that try to advocate the welfare state as a hallmark of European civilization, as they lack the proper analytical method to do so. It proposes an original approach that reveals a structural analogy that exists between the welfare state and the modern sovereign state. In a short historical survey, it demonstrates that during the process of its formation, the modern state gained structural elements that on one hand created a foundation for its later transformation into the welfare state, but on the other hand became a source of deep distrust. As this distrust also influenced the development of the postwar welfare system, the entire project eventually became vulnerable to ideological criticism. The paper shows that today's condemnations of the welfare state for its alleged non-affordability are but an echo of an older ideological-populist and liberal-distrust of the state itself. Finally, the paper attempts to argue in favour of both the modern sovereign state and the welfare state by developing an argument for their de facto existence and usefulness and showing the fundamental fallacy of the counter-arguments of its critics.

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1992

European Journal of Sociology, 2014

What, in fact,isthe Welfare State? This article traces the emergence of the welfare state as a specific mode of government, describing its distinctive rationality as well as its characteristic forms, functions and effects. It identifies five sectors of welfare governance, the relations between them, and the various forms these take in different times and places. It discusses the contradictory commitments that shape welfare state practices and the problems associated with these practices and contradictions. It situates welfare state government within a long-term account of the changing relations between the social and the economic spheres. And it argues that the welfare state ought to be understood as a “normal social fact”—an essential (though constantly contested) part of the social and economic organization of modern capitalist societies.

OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, 2005

Israeli Constitutional Law in the Making

I. INTRODUCTION T HOUGH IT HAS been repeatedly asserted that theoretical arguments against recognition of social welfare (SW) rights have been effectively answered, 1 they tend to resurface in implicit fashion in legal doctrine. This chapter argues that at the core of contemporary manifestations of the traditional objections to SW rights is their unique relationship with money. The chapter sheds light on the structure of the current version of the old objections by reviewing judicial rulings in courts in general and in Israeli courts in the fields of health, education and welfare in particular. Focusing on this one particular justification-that objections to social and economic rights collapse into reservations regarding judicial abilities to deal with fiscal issues-carries the potential to highlight the ambiguities and inconsistencies in the judgments and in the arguments that underlie them. But before doing so, some preliminaries must be addressed. First, as always: terminology. But in this case, terminology is also substantive. Scholars writing on the theoretical and pragmatic objections to judicial enforcement of rights to education, health, housing and the like, tend to use the term 'social and economic rights'. 2 This chapter, however, will follow the lead suggested by Mark Tushnet and use the term 'social welfare rights'. 3 As Herman Schwartz and others have recently noted, 'the central issue is not really about social and economic rights, but primarily about social rights. More precisely, it is * I would like to thank Mark Tushnet, Aeyal Gross, Neta Ziv and other participants in the conference for thoughtful and helpful comments. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

The aim of the following article is to contextualize the intense internatinal debate on Social Economy from the point of view of the relationship between it and the evolution of the welfare states. And so, the first section deals with the review of the main theoretical proposals that have tackled the study regarding the relationship between the thrid sector and the public sector with the view to establishing the links between the different notions of the third sector (Social Economy and Nonprofit Entities) and the welfare system of which these notions form part. In the second section, we outline the main lines of change that the welfare states are adopting and the resulting rebalance which is generated in each regimen between the third sector and the public sector with a view to fixing the main coordinates at which the new conceptual challenges of Social Economy are presented. The article ends with a section on conclusions and a number of considerations.