This article has four sections. the first section briefly describes the place and the features of social policies in the post-crisis scenario prof. faria considers the most plausible one. in the second section the interdependence between the attributes of existence, validity and efficiency are recollected in order to demonstrate how the inefficiency of norms, particularly, of those which prescribe the universal realization of social rights, can reflow and affect its semantical content and strength. The third section analyses the relation between social policy and fundamental rights as a relation between means and purposes which has in social rights the main mediation link, extending the consequences related to social rights found in the second section to normative-legal pretenses refereed to citizens' public and private autonomy. The fourth section closes the article with a brief conclusion.
Universality of purposes and particularization of means; social policy; normative meaning of fundamental rights