2008] The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights 173 the analytical philosophers” 350 that the Essence Appro ach most fully recalls, nor do we rely on the positivist toolk it of the Consensus Approach or the institutionalist insights of Obligations. Instead, we must adopt instrumental, motion-oriented metaphors to investigate this claim. Such analysis may invite a differen t prospect and a different politics for the minimum core concept. It is not one that can pr escribe a more determinate formula for the Committee, for supr anational tribunals and constitutional courts, or socioeconomic policy makers . Instead, it ass esses whether t he minimum core concept might catalyze claims and broach new alliances by drawing attention to the expressive and symbolic f eatures of t he minimum core idea. It recognizes that the la nguage deployed in cl aims of material distribution or r edistribution—discourses involving poverty, mat erial need, and the statistics of available GDP—ha s profound political consequences. In other words, even if a concept has an admirabl e legal pedigree or a recognizable institutional operation, it is still meaningful to investigate how it structures the discourse around the redistributions in question. Theorists of the welfare state, in the United States and elsewhere, have long sought to expose the damaging moral and political work done by the words used to describe the condition of “the poor.” Key words like “dependency,” 351 (especially in the United States) have focused attention on a perceived lack of self-reliance and self-control on behalf of certain groups. Labels like “pauper” have sought to separate able-bodied people from the disabled, sick, and elderly. Indeed, in every needs-based program, advocates and detractors alike have drawn 352 Such distinctions between the dese rving and the undeserving poor. distinctions stigmatize the claimants in classifications which are at odds with the notion of rights. This stigma soun ds in a failure to shore up political support for economic and social rights, and indeed, is at the base of political backlash against them.353 It is thus necessary to investig ate whether the core and non-core distinctions of economic and social ri ghts simply repeat these categorizations. The fact that the concept seeks to set universal entitlements for every individual based on the theory of righ ts apparently distinguishes it from merits-based classifications—by adopting “targeting within universalism” and “helping the poor by not talking about them” 354 as long-term, politically nuanced policy strategies. But I believe that it is necessary to investigate whether the minimum core language also manages somehow to smuggle the desert-based classifications back in. It becomes necessary to examine, for 350. Id. at 264. 351. See Nancy Fraser & Linda Gordon, A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyw ord of the U.S. Welfare State, 19 SIGNS: J. OF WOMEN & CULTURE IN SOC’Y 309 (1994). 352. MICHAEL B. KATZ, THE UNDESERVING POOR: FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE WAR ON WELFARE 8 (1989) (describing how Am erican political discourse on poverty “slipped easily, unreflectively, into a language of fa mily, race, and culture rather than ineq uality, power, and exploitation”); Thomas Ross, The Rhetoric of Poverty: Their Immorality, Our Helplessness, 79 GEO. L.J. 1499 (1991). 353. FRASER & HONNETH, RECOGNITION OR REDISTRIBUTION, supra note 26. 354. Theda Skocpol, Targeting with Universa lism: Politically Viable Policies to Combat Poverty in the United States , in THE URBAN UNDERCLASS 411, 427 (Christopher Jencks & Paul E. Peterson eds., 1991) (proposing targeting within universalism).