The article examines the conception of social rights found in the writings of Noël Babeuf in the late eighteenth century and those of his followers, the neo-Babouvists, in the first half of the nineteenth. Both believed that social rights were to be based on natural needs, which they identified as physical and moral: while physical needs necessitated the right to subsistence, moral needs encompassed the right to education. Babeuf and the neo-Babeuvists also believed that social rights were inseparable from the principle of equality and the reciprocity of rights and duties among society’s members. The neo-Babeuvists added to this by envisaging labour law and the right to work as constituting the legitimate and reciprocal counterparts of the property rights of employers. This balancing of property rights and workers’ rights was to be provisional, however, pending the transformation of society towards a community of goods.