Entitlements, or Rechtsansprühe, have become central in both American and (West) German political discourse. Rather than focusing on the possession of private property as the basis of security (as in the nineteenth century), individuals have increasingly demanded legally guaranteed social claims as the ultimate barrier against a fall into misery. The demands reflect past failures of private property to provide satisfactory protection against the effects of inflation and depression, for example.

Developments in postwar West Germany suggest that demands for entitlements also reflect more complex attitudes about individual rights, status, and agency. Operating in a culture of rights, twentieth-century German property holders believed that they had a right to their private property and personal status because both reflected their moral worth and efficacy as individuals. To preserve the moral order, they asserted, society must act to restore that property and status whenever human villainy or amoral material forces wiped them out. Doing so would reaffirm both the honor and the autonomy of individuals. Germans raised their claim of substantive rights for an inherently superior minority against two other discourses: laissez-faire liberalism, which recognized only economic necessity and formal rights, and the politics of victimization, which offered broad but demeaning claims for social assistance.