The constitutionalization of social rights in Brazil: diffuse and collective or confused and selective?

Abstract

This article attempts to present some considerations on the rise and development of social rights issues in Brazil from its discussion and reception at positivised patriotic duty, as well as their peculiarities and contradictions, if analyzed solely in light of classical literature on the subject. Initially, it discusses on is the evolution of social rights in the West from the Industrial Revolution in England and the French Revolution, which provided, respectively, the concrete foundations for their
ideological and philosophical development as well as the claim by the in-insurgents social movements and socialism. Then, its emergence, recognition and legitimacy in the post-Second World War, through the demands and rights embodied in the so-called State of Social Welfare (Welfare State), hegemonic process in Europe by mid-1980. Finally, it indicates distinctive features of the assumption of social rights in major Brazilian legislation, and some paradoxes in the exercise of civil, political and social institutions in our society over the twentieth century, until the demarcation of the current so-called diffuse and collective rights, sculptured in the Constitution of 1988.