The Welfare State and the Dilemma of Equality and Freedom

Résumé 0

A regime of individual freedoms leads to take into account inequalities in the context of the equality of rights; at the beginning of the 20th century it led to build mechanisms of redistribution which later became foundations for the development of the Welfare State, generalized after the Second World War. These new social forms questioned the classical definition of freedom as equal submission to an impartial law and they implicitely opened the possibility of another definition of freedom, as a guarantee for access to the conditions of independence. This second definition must be considered with the first one all together and be explicitely formulated so that a dialogue could be possible between these two approaches of this major concept of modern politics.