The dissertation analyzes 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. 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 dynamic 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 reveals that EU social rights imply the contours of a particular social order. The essential features in question are derived through detailed analyses of EU social rights - through critical investigations of definitions of rightholders, material scope, legal core concepts, exclusions and justifications, complexities and ambiguities of interpretation - demonstrating that political-philosophical features of social order are implied not only in the overall constitutional aspects of law, but in the material web of secondary law as well.