This paper offers a broad philosophical and historical background to the development and the migration of the concept of inclusive education by offering four related perspectives. In the first section of the paper we review “the analytics of exclusion” by reference to the work of Michel Foucault who provides the modern history of exclusion in terms of the politics of exclusion and makes it central to his approach in understanding the evolution of modern institutions of emerging liberal societies (Foucault, 2006). For Foucault exclusion/inclusion becomes the major axis for the analysis of institutions. In the second section of the paper we trace the political ecology (and “etiology”) of social inclusion as response to the crisis of the welfare state and the French Republican tradition of social solidarity initiated by Rene Lenoir and its migration and eventual adoption as a fundamental principle for the European social model that emerged as a standard policy framework in the 1990s. In the third section we engage in a philosophical discussion of inclusive education, understood within these defining parameters, that draws the distinction between the legal and moral legitimation of rights on the one hand, and questions moral justifications (or the lack of them) offered for the right to inclusive education, on the other

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