Vulnerability between political theory and normative texts: a new language to repeat old things or a new tool to problematize differences in social power?

In this essay I try to reread the classical theories of modern political thought through the lens of vulnerability and build a bridge between classical debates and the contemporary debate on protecting socially weaker subjects and meeting their needs and interests. The article discusses in particular the difference between inherently personal vulnerability and situational vulnerability. The first notion of vulnerability is reconstructed on the basis of a series of European directives (and a decision of the CJEU) related to crime victims and asylum seekers. The second one is reconstructed on the basis of the international treatises and the European directives on trafficking in human beings. My contention is that the second notion of vulnerability can absorb the first one and represent a disruptive conceptual tool for dealing with the “Sophie’s choice” in which many workers are today entrapped.