This book develops a very particular concept of sociality: a holistic way of understanding how human beings have come to care about and collectively provide for their welfare as a species and to recognise each other’s needs in terms of shared social rights. It tells not so much a success story as a hopeful story. It provides a new way of looking at how our rights to life’s essentials have been in the past, are now and can in the future be understood. It is, potentially, a book for anyone interested in the human condition but will be especially interesting for those engaged in human service provision, community action, social development, welfare law and political debate, and particularly useful to students of social policy and human rights.

It is a radically revised edition of Social Rights and Human Welfare, first published in 2015. It provides modified, re-organised and updated versions of chapters from that book while offering a wholly new underlying narrative through which further to develop and apply the author’s alternative theory of social rights. It is a book about the connections between social rights and human welfare; between theory and practice; between debate and reality in the spheres of human service provision and human livelihoods.

Hartley Dean is an Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He had for 12 years been a welfare rights worker in Brixton, South London, before moving on to a 40-year academic career researching, teaching and writing about social justice issues.