Hierarchies, Logics and Foundations of Social Order Seen Through the Prism of EU Social Rights

Abstract

It has been the purpose of this dissertation to analyze a contemporary battlefield of law, the field of EU social rights, from a political-philosophical point of view. It is the conviction of the dissertation that law is deeply and inescapably conceptually connected with fundamental features of social order. Law and social order are not presumed to be identical, but to be mutually constitutive. The interrelations between the two do not merely concern the rights and obligations explicitly laid down in the law, but fundamental presumptions regarding the nature of human beings, overall purposes of social order, hierarchical and dynamical features of society and the possibility at all of regulation, its logics and sources of authority. On the basis of a historical-conceptual understanding of law according to which law, social structure and metaphysical presumptions are inescapably intertwined, the dissertation derives from the binding provisions of law certain essential features of social order. More precisely, the dissertation demonstrates that from a political philosophical point of view, EU social rights can be said to imply the contours of a particular social order. Significantly, the essential features in question are derived through detailed analyses of EU social rights - through critical investigations of definitions of right-holders, material scope, legal core concepts, exclusions and justifications, complexities and ambiguities of interpretation. The general point is the following: Political philosophical features of social order may not only be derived from the overall constitutional aspects of law (in the case of EU-law: fundamental principles inscribed in the Treaty; the constitutional architecture of EU-law), but are implied in the detailed material web of secondary law