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were based on ideas about the order of society which were closely
debated by politicians. How far, for example, should state intervention
replace individual responsibility? Should all citizens have the
same rights to social security, or should differences be made according
to need or any other criteria? One of the most interesting fundamental
questions of this kind was the question of justice. How could
the new system be set up in such a way as to produce justice, and
what sort of justice should this be?
While there is an extensive literature on the history of social
ideas, 3 it is usually not related to the political and institutional analyses
of social policy studies, 4 and even less to ideas not directly linked
to the policy sphere. Apart from the religious sphere, justice can be
thought of only in social relations, but as an idea it cannot be directly
connected with a particular period, or with any specific political or
other system. It is a regulative, infinite idea, ‘a heritage of human -
kind’, 5 first influentially systematized by Aristotle. Many other
thinkers, from the scholastic tradition to the defenders of natural
rights, have followed him. Politically of great influence were the
American and the French revolutions of the late eighteenth century
with the declarations of human rights that they produced: ‘In them,
and under the significant influence of modern natural law, fundamental
notions of justice are defined in juridico-institutional form
and guaranteed as rights of freedom with regard to the state.’ 6 But
163; and, recently, E. P. Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and
Germany, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2007), 182 et seq.
3 See the comprehensive work by Helga Grebing (ed.), Geschichte der sozialen
Ideen in Deutschland: Sozialismus—Katholische Sozial lehre—Protestantische
Sozialethik. Ein Handbuch (2nd edn., Essen, 2005).
4 A volume recently published in the Quellensammlung series to some extent
furnishes this missing link. It presents the basic ideas of the protagonists of
social policy, ranging from liberal social reform to socialism and conservatism.
See Ralf Stremmel et al., Grundfragen der Sozialpolitik in der öffentlichen
Diskussion: Kirchen, Parteien, Vereine und Verbände, Quellensammlung, 1st section,
vol. 8 (Mainz, 2006).
5 See Otfried Höffe, Gerechtigkeit: Eine philosophische Einführung (3rd edn.,
Munich, 2007), 9.
6 Fritz Loos and Hans-Ludwig Schreiber, ‘Recht, Gerechtigkeit’, in Otto
Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhard Kosselleck (eds.), Ge schicht liche
Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutsch land,
8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972–97), v. 231–311, at 280.
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