Abstract
The study focuses on the Chilean constituent process scheduled for the second semester of 2022: we propose to analyse the legal and political debate which the need for a constitutional change has been generating in the last several years with particular regard to the issue of the justiciability of social rights. In examining these problems, from a methodological point of view, a moderately skeptical position toward the normative potential of the general theory of law is implicitly defended. According to this framework, the normative consideration of conceptual problems always needs to be integrated by the evaluation of contingent legal, political and social factors. We aim to show that there is no rigid causal link between the presence of a wide catalogue of social rights in a constitution and the satisfaction of the benefits associated with them. On the other hand, the study aims to show that the symbolic and expressive meaning associated with the possible reaffirmation of the founding values of constitutional texts is even more important in a society characterized, like the Chilean one, by a long-standing tendency to go against the redistributive principles that inspire the logic of social rights.