The political achievements of liberalism and social democracy that are the product of the bourgeois emancipation movements and the European labor movement suggest an affirmative answer to this question. To be sure, both attempted to overcome the disenfranchisement of underprivileged groups and with it the division of society into social classes; but where liberal social reform came into play, the struggle against the oppression of collectivities deprived of equal social opportunities took the form of a struggle for the social-welfarist universalization of civil rights. Since the bankruptcy of state socialism, this perspective has indeed been the only one remaining: the status of a dependent wage
earner is to be supplemented with rights to social and political participation, and the mass of the population is thereby to be given the opportunity to live in realistic expectation of security, social justice, and affluence. A more equitable distribution of collective goods is to compensate for the unequal conditions of life in capitalist societies. This aim is thoroughly compatible with the theory of rights, because the primary goods (in Rawls’s sense) are either distributed among individuals (like money, free time, and services) or used by individuals (like the infrastructures of transportation, health care, and education), and can thus take the form of individual claims to benefits.