Barton Swaim
Review: Michael Novak and Paul Adams with Elizabeth Shaw, ‘Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is’
The term “social justice” in today’s academic and
political discourse has almost exclusively to do with governmental action and
nothing to do with individual morality. It is, as a common textbook definition
has it, “the fair distribution of advantages and disadvantages in society.”
That definition, Paul Adams and
Michael Novak argue, is only concerned with the physical allocation of goods,
implying “that some extra-human force, some very visible hand, that is, some
powerful agency—the state—should do the distribution.” In that sense, the term
works chiefly as a vague but ever-ready justification for expansions of state
power over individual lives, new regulations of the private sector, and further
expansions of welfare programs that show no evidence of past success.
That’s not how the term began. It
was born, Adams and Novak insist, in discussions between Roman Catholic
scholars and ecclesiastics, and made its earliest appearances in papal
encyclicals. In its original context, social justice was not a societal or
political condition—a state of affairs resulting from an equitable distribution
of wealth—but a “personal virtue with social implications.”
It was Adams who first had the
idea of this book, Social Justice Isn’t
What You Think It Is. Long troubled by the way in which his academic field
uses the term exclusively in the secularized and state-centered way, he decided
to combine his own sociological analysis with various writings by Novak, who of
course is a well-known Catholic defender of economic liberty. The result is a
surprisingly formidable book—surprising because what you thought was going to
be an essay on a single term expands into a wide-ranging treatise on individual
morality and societal cohesion.
The authors’ chief obstacle, though,
isn’t so much the widespread use or misuse of the term, but Friedrich Hayek’s
evisceration of the whole concept. Hayek, in The Mirage of Social Justice (the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty), argued
that social justice assumes human agency where none exists. Justice and
injustice only make sense, he believed, in the context of human culpability: a
person or group of people can be guilty of perpetrating injustice; a political
or governmental system, considered in the abstract, cannot.
That is why social justice
campaigners often have such a difficult time articulating what it is they want.
On the one hand, many of their criticisms of society aren’t applicable to any
one situation. The existence of poverty in American society, for example,
though tragic, is not something any person or group deliberately brought about.
If certain individuals are deliberately perpetuating the system, social justice
advocates might have a point; but they would be obliged to demonstrate who the
perpetrators are, what specific wrongs they have carried out, and on what
grounds the perpetrators might be stopped and punished.
And even when social justice
campaigners do highlight specific crimes or misdeeds—the brutality of police
officers during an arrest, say—the remedies they propose go far beyond the
specific misdeeds they decry. Indeed, they often insist that those specific
misdeeds are only a small manifestation of the wider injustice they seek to
remedy. But who has perpetrated the injustice? Society? Government? These are
abstractions, and to hold them guilty of injustice, argues Hayek, is to
anthropomorphize them and so indulge in nonsense. There is a well-intentioned
but dangerous confusion at the heart of the social justice movement, which is
why it sometimes explodes into irrational rioting.
Hayek concludes that social
justice is an empty concept, useless except as a rhetorical cudgel. Novak’s
answer is to define the term as a personal virtue with social implications, and
to link it with other principles of Catholic social teaching—teachings on the
common good, the right of association, the right to private property, and so
on. Novak is thus able to rescue the concept from its modern secular advocates,
and in the process suggest new ways for conservatives to make the case for
traditionalist morality in the public sphere. Adams makes those arguments in
the book’s final chapters. He contends, for instance, that the promotion of
marriage—“traditional marriage,” as it’s now called—may fruitfully be thought
of as a matter of social justice. And indeed the statistical relationship
between the dissolution of marriage, on the one hand, and deleterious
sociological trends, on the other—poor educational achievement, unemployment,
the abuse of children—makes that contention difficult to dismiss.
Non-Catholic readers may be
inclined to skim the chapters discussing the papal encyclicals that first used
the term and concept of social justice. That would be a mistake—first because
Novak’s writing is consistently lucid and instructive, and second because it’s
only by following the development of Catholic thought on social justice is the
reader able to see why the term “social justice” was needed in the first place.
Briefly: Two pontiffs—Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891) and, forty years later, Pope Pius
XI in Quadragesimo
Anno (1931)—struggled to answer a question that in one form or
another dominated Europe from the mid-19th century on: Would economic activity
be governed by a centralized state, or not?
Both these men sharply criticized
the new socialist ideology as inhuman and dangerous. But what should take its
place? The answer was far from obvious, but both Leo XIII and Pius XI insisted
on the need for political arrangements that would allow for human freedom while
also encouraging “social justice”—a term that made sense in the context of
these encyclicals but still lacked precise meaning.
It was not until Pope John Paul
II’s Centesimus
Annus in 1991—published on the centenary of the aforementioned Rerum Novarum, and just as communism
had been finally discredited—that the Vatican produced a satisfyingly nuanced
answer to the question of whether Christians should embrace “capitalism.” John
Paul II argued that, yes, free markets preserve private property and create
wealth for greater numbers than command economies have ever achieved, but he
also insisted that the aim of free markets must be to foster an ordered
freedom, not merely appetite, and that they must therefore be governed by moral
and religious impulses.
All this is the basis of Novak’s
redefinition of social justice. It isn’t some all-purpose justification for
expansions of state power, he writes, but a virtue, “a set of new habits and
abilities that need to be learned, perfected, and passed on to new
generations.” It is “that specific habit of justice which entails two or more
persons acting (1) in association and (2) for the good of the City.” Social
justice, then, corresponds roughly to the practice Alexis de Tocqueville
thought was the first and most important habit of a thriving democracy: the
habit of forming free associations in order to achieve public ends. When
citizens learn to practice social justice, the results are higher levels of
employment and opportunity, lower levels of destitution and crime, fewer suicides,
and educational advancement by greater numbers—in essence, exactly what today’s
social justice campaigners would seem to want.
Social Justice Isn’t What You
Think It Is combines excellent scholarship with engaging prose and a genuine
concern for human flourishing.
Still, I’m not convinced. The
authors are right to reject “social justice” as the term is commonly used, but
to my mind its proper meaning is sufficiently clear without the aid of the
Catholic Church’s social teaching, and indeed without inventing a new virtue.
Social justice refers to the degree to which a society or nation applies just
laws fairly. Put aside the encyclicals and consider the Old Testament prophets.
“Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?” the prophet
Habbakuk asks God. “Destruction and violence are before me; strife and
contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For
the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.” The
prophet sees a city in which people are routinely swindled and in which
official justice is fraudulent. The prophet is grieved, not merely by
injustices perpetrated by individuals in specific situations, but by the state
of injustice prevailing throughout his society.
If this more self-evident
definition of social justice obtains, American society is, for all its flaws,
essentially a just society. Its laws are mostly humane, and the enforcement of
those laws is usually not arbitrary. And that, of course, is why social justice
campaigners would never accept it: the progressive mindset is premised on the
belief that American society is essentially unjust. (Somehow the term “social
justice” is rarely if ever applied to non-western nations—North Korea, say, or
Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe or Afghanistan.) But none of this is a reason to
redefine the term in so lengthy and complex a fashion as Adams and Novak have
done. You shouldn’t have to read Tocqueville and papal encyclicals to
understand what social justice is.
I suspect Christians in all ages,
Catholic and Protestant, have understood the nature of social justice well
enough, not by reflecting on papal pronouncements but by considering the
character of God and the biblical meaning of “justice” (that is, righteousness)
itself. I think of question number 74 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a
document published by Puritans in 1647. What, the catechism asks, is required
by the eighth commandment, the commandment against stealing? What the
commandment forbids is
clear enough, but what does it require?
“The eighth commandment requireth the lawful procuring and furthering the
wealth and outward estate of ourselves and others.” If I read Adams and Novak
correctly, that’s social justice avant la lettre.
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