Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is. Paul Adams
Michael Novak
Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is
“SOCIAL JUSTICE” IS ONE OF THE TERMS MOST OFTEN USED IN ethical and political discourse, but one will search in vain for definitions of it. Because of its fuzziness and warmth, everybody wants to share in it. There is a whole band of Catholics calling themselves “social justice Catholics.” But they rarely give you a forthright definition of social justice, or an explanation of how their view differs from other views of social justice that are widely held.
It is true that Pope Leo XIII in 1891 was searching for a new virtue for “new times.” Yet he didn’t choose the term “social justice.” He thought briefly about “social charity,” then Pius XI in 1931 settled firmly on “social justice.”
Today the term has slipped into being used so broadly that a fairly recent obituary in the diocesan paper of Wilmington, Delaware, reported that a dear Sister Maureen gave her entire life as a nun for “social justice.” Sister Maureen was a missionary in Africa for forty-six years, cared for the sick, taught the young, and brought assistance to the suffering and the poor. Are we to gather that “social justice,” then, is a synonym for the deeds we must do to “enter the kingdom of heaven,” that is, care for the widows, the hungry, the poor, and those in prison?
Saint Matthew’s gospel lays out the underlying principle of both the traditional and the new understandings of social justice in two meaty chapters (24 and 25). His account includes the warning that the Last Judgment will be, yes, quite “judgmental.” It will also be sharply “non-inclusive.” It will separate the sheep from the goats, and some indeed will be cast out:
Then it will be their turn to ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or lacking clothes, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?” Then he will answer, “In truth I tell you, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.” And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the upright to eternal life.1
As Professor Adams noted in his introduction, the modern papal concept of social justice seems to go rather far beyond the demands of the Beatitudes (which demand the contributions of all Christians, often in private and barely recognized ways) and the heroic efforts of the saints. The new virtue enunciated by Leo XIII and Pius XI invites new modes of analysis, for both strategic thinking and immediate practical thinking. It also invites new capacities for organization never before summoned into being.
I ONCE HEARD a young professor at the Catholic University of Ružomberok, Slovakia, say that he thinks of social justice as “an ideal arrangement of society, in which justice and charity are fully served.” This description appealed to me, and yet I found something troubling in the fact that it pictures social justice as an ideal arrangement toward which society should progressively strive.
The American Socialist Irving Howe wrote in Dissent in 1954: “Socialism is the name of our desire.”2 He meant a dream of justice and equality and democracy. Is social justice also the name of a dream, but not exactly the socialist dream?
In our search for a definition of the term, we may also ask: To which genus does social justice belong? Is it a vision of a perfectly just society? Is it an ideal set of government policies? Is it a theory? Is it a practice? . . . In sum, is it a virtue, that is, a habit embodied in individual persons, or is it a social arrangement?
On another plane entirely, we may ask: Is social justice a nonreligious concept? Many secular sociologists and political philosophers use it that way, trying to tie it as closely as possible to the term “equality”—in the arithmetical French sense of égalité. Like the equals sign.
Or is social justice a religious term, evangelical in inspiration?
Has social justice become an ideological marker, favoring progressives over conservatives, Democrats over Republicans, social workers over corporate executives? Is that the sort of favor “social justice Catholics” mete out?
To understand the meaning of this term, “social justice,” we need to do two things: first, walk through the origin and early development of the term. To know where we are going, we must first know where we have been.
Second, we need to seek out a fresh statement of the definition of social justice—one that is true to the original understanding, ideologically neutral among political and economic partisans, and applicable to the circumstances of today.
Then, in chapters three and four, we shall confront one of the severest critics of the “mirage” of social justice, Friedrich Hayek, and the irony that he himself practiced social justice.
Social Justice—A Brief History
Let us begin with the locus classicus of the term “social justice,” which was made canonical in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI in 1931. This was at the height of the Great Depression, a time of crisis for the capitalist world. Hitler was gaining power in Germany. Mussolini had been ruling in Italy for nearly a decade. Stalin was about to stage the systematic starvation of millions of Ukrainians for clinging to their private property.
The occasion for Pius’s encyclical was the fortieth anniversary of the first papal document on economic life. To begin, then, we must understand the eponymous “new things” in cultural and economic life at the turn of the nineteenth century, which prompted Leo XIII to write Rerum Novarum in 1891.
A quick aside: Popes are duty-bound to be concerned with the life of the spirit and with eternity. If humans do not work in the light of eternity, there will be an important dimension missing in their lives. This was Tocqueville’s point when he said that religion is the first institution of democracy. Unless you understand that every human being has a transcendent importance beyond any pragmatic or utilitarian consideration, you cannot understand the meaning of human rights. That is the crucial frame of reference that religion supplies to democracy. For this reason, Tocqueville thought, in the United States, as distinguished from Europe, religion and liberty were lucky to have remained friends, because the doctrine of rights received its proper foundation in the Creator. As he wrote:
I have already said enough to put Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the product (and this point of departure must always be kept in mind) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere are often at odds. But in America, these two have been successfully blended, in a way, and marvelously combined. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. . . .
Far from harming each other, these two tendencies, apparently so opposed, move in harmony and seem to offer mutual support.
Religion sees in civil liberty a noble exercise of the faculties of man; in the political world, a field offered by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence. Free and powerful in its sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it, religion knows that its dominion is that much better established because it rules only by its own strength and dominates hearts without other support.
Liberty sees in religion the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its early years, the divine source of its rights. Liberty considers religion as the safeguard of mores, mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration.3
In any case, with Rerum Novarum