Costly ambiguities: Afterword to the Foreword by Nehal Bhuta

Abstract Even as social rights now appear in the majority of the world’s constitutions, most of the core human rights treaties, and many legislative bills of rights, their political and legal meaning remain ambiguous. Nehal Bhuta’s 2025 Foreword seeks clarity through a return to older history, and an examination of the demands made by the nineteenth-century Jacobin and Chartist movements for a guaranteed access to “fair shares of the economic whole.” This Afterword compares and contrasts Bhuta’s genealogy with the influential paradigm of transformative constitutionalism and the centrality of social rights within it. In particular, it examines the more recent developments of social rights, in prominent twentieth-century expressions made after World War II and in Global South contexts, where the constitutionalist vision of social rights reflected an effort to tame both laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism, alongside a “never again” response to the devastations of fascism. That vision of social rights has been disrupted, and sometimes accommodated, by the neoliberal political economy of recent decades. This Afterword observes that the “fair shares” origins of social rights, and especially the collective and natural rights dimensions that the Foreword chooses to highlight, both broaden and limit the capacity of social rights to respond to our current economic and populist challenges and constitutional transformations.