Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams
programs, pro and con. My task has instead been to set forth a fresh concept of social justice, as a particular specification of the virtue of justice suited to free, democratic societies, and to defend it in such a way that every person who encounters this concept might see how this virtue can be (and is already being) practiced in his or her own life. In a few final words, let me show how I think it was practiced in Hayek’s life.
Hayek’s Practice
One of the great works of mercy is to give sight to the blind. For teachers and writers, this is a metaphor for what they try to do every day: to give understanding where there was darkness; that is, to precipitate those frequent light-bulb insights that give expression to the acute pleasure, “Now I get it!” No one who is reading through the corpus of Hayek’s writings can doubt his tireless commitment to communicating the insights necessary to the health and preservation of the free and the good society. Few have worked so hard or tilled the soil so deeply, with as much originality and passionate instruction. Hayek committed his life to working for the free society—for the sake of all future human beings. He worked with as many others as possible to give this work diffusion. He worked for the good of the Human City, and he worked with others; that is, he fulfilled the two conditions that exemplify the habit of social justice.
Yet Hayek did more than write and teach. I have seen his portrait in institutions on practically every continent. He joined with Antony Fisher and others to launch a set of institutions committed to research and public debate on the foundations of the free society. Mr. Fisher chose a universal name for these institutes that embodied an appropriate metaphor, the Atlas Foundation, for it is ideas and moral commitments that hold high the free society. At considerable personal sacrifice, Hayek was unstinting in his willingness to help these and other institutions committed to liberty by travelling to them to give public lectures, making tapes, serving on boards, providing international contacts, even offering shrewd, concrete advice.
Hayek was an activist as well as a scholar. He was an intellectual engagé, as they said two generations ago—a public intellectual, as we say today. To work for the public good is also a work of social justice.
The most striking of Hayek’s initiatives in this respect was his vision for and leadership of the Mont Pelerin Society, which he launched in 1947 as a prestigious international society of economists, political philosophers, legal scholars, statesmen, and others to probe and to discuss the contemporary crisis of the free society, so that after the horrors of World War II the world of intellect would not again rush pell-mell into ideas destructive of liberty.
One of Hayek’s chief intentions was to draw religious thinkers into reflection on the desperate needs of the liberal society and to pull secular liberals back from unthinking antireligious prejudices. He believed that the friends of liberty were relatively few, and that those few must not work at cross-purposes. He believed, as well, that the “progressive” bias in favor of the free polity (democracy) while cherishing disdain for the free economy was a betrayal of the liberal intellectual tradition. That is why Hayek meant to recover the term “liberal” in its classical modern meaning. He at first proposed to call his new society, whose founding members were summoned by Hayek to a meeting in a village near Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, the Acton-Tocqueville Society. Whereupon a distinguished economist from the University of Chicago is reported to have announced: “I’ll be damned if I’ll belong to a society named for two Catholics!”5 A compromise was struck: the name of the nearby mountain was chosen. The Society still prospers, with far more members than ever before.
I REST MY CASE. Despite his deep contempt for those concepts of social justice that do injury to the free society, Hayek overlooked a concept of social justice—social justice rightly understood—that put a name to the specific habit of justice of which he was an eminent practitioner. Moreover, if Tocqueville is right, that “the Principle of Association is the first law of democracy,”6 then social justice understood in this way is the first virtue of democracy, for it is the habit of making the Principle of Association incarnate. This was for Hayek not just an empirical law; it also had moral consequences:
It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common effort of many.7
In brief, Hayek was something of a model for how a public intellectual ought to practice social justice: tirelessly, with wit, with civility, with gentleness, and with a very deep learning. As I have written elsewhere:
[Hayek] did write deeply and systematically about ethics and society, about politics and the markets, and above all the kind of laws and institutions indispensable to human liberty. In the sense of working ardently to build a more humane society, he was a great practitioner of social justice.8
It might have killed him to say so, but he was in fact a model of the virtue of social justice rightly understood.
Looking Ahead
Until now, I have tried to be analytical, fair, clear, and terse. But the next three chapters are about the sixteen principles of Catholic social teaching, and they need to be elucidated in a rather more philosophical and theological language than in a language closer to social science, such as I have been using. Please note that in these three chapters I will not be laying out an argument or trying to persuade, but simply presenting the background principles from which I work. For readers who are not Catholic, some of these principles, rooted in experience, will carry plausibility, while those principles that derive from Catholic faith may not. Still, I hope such readers will find of some use an unvarnished statement of the Catholic view.
Sixteen Principles of Catholic Social Thought: The Five Cs Sixteen Principles of Catholic Social Thought: The Five Cs
SOCIAL JUSTICE IS A PIVOTAL PRINCIPLE IN CATHOLIC SOCIAL teaching today,1 but it is not the only principle, nor the most important one. In fact, there are at least sixteen principles of Catholic social teaching. To grasp the concrete importance of social justice, it is best to see all sixteen principles arrayed together. Only in that way can one grasp the actual workings of social justice in their full context.
The sixteen principles of Catholic social teaching arise from an inner power infused in us by our Creator and Redeemer, which we try to knead as yeast into daily life. Catholic social teaching is constantly being informed by concrete experience, and as times change, new principles slowly gain clarity when new problems and new opportunities cast new light. As central governments grew swollen with new powers, the principle of subsidiarity—of limiting central power and respecting local powers—came more sharply into view. As each culture in the world became far more aware of all the others, even of distant cultures on the other side of the planet, the principle of human solidarity gained attention. As institutions of human rights were put to work (most unevenly) around the world, the salience of Church support for human rights in country after country gained international notice. Samuel Huntington of Harvard began to speak of the “Third Wave” of worldwide democracy as the “Catholic wave.”2
1. The First C: Caritas
Love of neighbor is thus shown to be possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has