Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  PRAISE FOR Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is

  I have read this book with real delight. Clear, profound, inspiring, and brilliant.—ROCCO BUTTIGLIONE, Italian Chamber of Deputies

  Novak and Adams write with compelling clarity and force. They make a rich contribution to our understanding of social justice and the policy implications that flow from it.—CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. CAP., Archbishop of Philadelphia

  A profound treatise on a topic dear to the heart of political progressives and social work professionals. Those who have never given the meaning of social justice a second thought will be greatly rewarded with reflective insights and a new understanding. Those who think they know the meaning of social justice will be challenged to think again—and more deeply.—NEIL GILBERT, Chernin Professor of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley

  Elegantly, winsomely, and with telling examples, Novak and Adams show how Catholic social thought challenges conventional “liberal” and “conservative” approaches to social issues. This is a terrific book for anyone who is prepared to look anew at the dilemmas facing a society that aspires to be both free and compassionate.—MARY ANN GLENDON, Professor of Law, Harvard University

  A distinctively caritas and catholic take on the concept of social justice that is rich in its originality, provocative, thoughtful in exposition, challenging us to transform our approach to social policy.—JOHN BRAITHWAITE, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

  This book presents an innovative vision of social justice as a preeminent, creative, and outgoing virtue deeply rooted in genuine Catholic social thought. It provides an indispensable guide for advancing the common good in a contemporary landscape plagued by a pervasive secularism and an extreme moral relativism.—WILLIAM C. BRENNAN, Professor, School of Social Work, Saint Louis University

  The challenge of writing about Catholic social thought is that doing so expertly requires prodigious learning in not only the Catholic tradition, but also in so many contiguous fields—such as economics, politics, law, theology, philosophy. Thankfully, our authors are masters of their craft. And they have produced a marvelous restatement, and interpretation, of this important body of Church teaching.—GERARD V. BRADLEY, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

  Before reading this book, I was suspicious of the phrase social justice. In Latin America, politicians and policy makers who use the social justice banner have committed many injustices. Acting supposedly on behalf of the general interest, the common good, or the poor, government programs essentially concentrate power, bloat bureaucracies, and often promote corruption. Novak and Adams surprised me when they distilled, from Catholic social thought and other sources, a definition centered on free individuals, as opposed to the Leviathan state. The Novak seal is evident because the definition emphasizes innovation, creativity, and human flourishing. Here, social justice, like plain justice, is a virtue “that empowers individual persons to act for themselves, to exercise their inborn social creativity.” How much will societies improve when they embrace this paradigm of social justice instead of the statist conception?—CARROLL RIOS DE RODRIGUEZ, Professor of Economics, Francisco Marroquín University, Guatemala

  Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is by Michael Novak and Paul Adams is a thoughtfully iconoclastic analysis and exposition of social justice as a virtue through the lens of Catholic social teaching—rejecting both individualism and collectivism and emphasizing the role of mediating social structures. Paul Adams, in particular, explores the application of social justice for Christians in professional social work. This book is an important resource for everyone interested in social justice and Christian practice.—DAVID A. SHERWOOD, Editor-in-Chief, Social Work & Christianity

  No concept in ethical and political philosophy is more in need of clarification and critical analysis than that of “social justice.” This term is a relatively late arrival in Catholic vocabulary. Novak and Adams provide a careful, thorough analysis of the term and the ideas and approach that make it useful. They also explain the ease with which the term can be misused. This is a very welcome book, not to be missed by anyone at all concerned with public order and understanding.—JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J., Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University

  Michael Novak and Paul Adams’s new book places the important discussion of social justice squarely within the best scholarship of the Catholic intellectual tradition. By transcending ideological biases, reading and interpreting the pertinent encyclicals impartially, and avoiding all political agendas, this thought-provoking new book should be welcomed by both the left and the right because of its fair, balanced, and reasoned approach.—JOHN G. TRAPANI, JR., Professor of Philosophy, Walsh University

  The difficult and risky underground publication of Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism in 1985 was widely circulated among the Polish democratic opposition and inspired many debates about how to shape the free Poland for which we fought. This new book will remind Poles of the breathtaking appearance of SDC 30 years ago. When small groups discussed with John Paul II Novak’s ideas, including those on social justice and others in the present volume, the pope several times said he considered Novak one of his best lay friends in the West. On those occasions when Novak was present, the pope listened with great attention.—MACIEJ ZIEBA, O.P., author of Papal Economics: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate

  Novak and Adams take on the hard task of defining social justice, which they identify as a personal virtue of a special modern type. Novak is unusually aware of abuses of the term by statists in former socialist lands like Slovakia, the country of his ancestors. Adams is especially good on the connection between charity and justice, and on the relation of marriage to both. Here in Europe, this book does a great and original service.—JURAJ KOHUTIAR, emeritus Director of International Affairs, Slovak Christian-Democratic Party, former anticommunist dissident and “Underground Church” activist

  I lived half of my life in Argentina, where the overwhelming majority adopted as a guiding policy principle a statist concept of social justice. I lived my other half in the United States, where many have practiced social justice as explained by Adams and Novak, building the institutions of a free and charitable society. Argentina was destroyed; the United States still has a chance. This immensely valuable book provides rich foundations for those who love liberty, justice, and a social environment conducive to human flourishing.—ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN, President, Atlas Network, and 2014 winner of the Walter Judd Freedom Award

  © 2015 by Michael Novak and Paul Adams

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.

  First American edition published in 2015 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

  Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48—1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Novak, Michael.

  Social justice isn’t what you think it is /

  Michael Novak, Paul Adams with Elizabeth Shaw.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-59403-828-0 (ebook)

  1. Social justice—Religi
ous aspects—Catholic Church.2. Christian sociology—

  Catholic Church.I. Adams, Paul, 1943–II. Title.

  BX1795.J87N68 2015

  261.8—dc23

  2015017129

  Dedicated to

  Kelli Steele Adams in love and gratitude

  and to

  Karen Laub Novak (1937–2009)

  for the energy that flows from her still.

  MATERIAL ADAPTED AND USED WITH PERMISSION

  Chapters 1 and 2: “Defining Social Justice,” First Things (December 2000); “Three Precisions: Social Justice,” First Things (December 1, 2010).

  Chapters 3 and 4: “Hayek: Practitioner of Social Justice,” in Three in One: Essays on Democratic Capitalism, 1976–2000, ed. Edward Younkins (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001).

  Chapter 9: “Social Justice Redefined: Pius XI,” in The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993).

  Chapter 10: “The Fire of Invention, the Fuel of Interest,” in The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997).

  Chapters 10 and 11: “Capitalism Rightly Understood,” in The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1993).

  Chapter 12: “Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas,” First Things (August 17, 2009).

  Chapter 13: “Agreeing with Pope Francis,” National Review Online (December 7, 2013).

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction by Paul Adams

  PART ONE The Theory

  by Michael Novak

  DEFINITIONS, CONTEXT

  1 Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is

  2 Six Secular Uses of “Social Justice,”

  3 A Mirage?

  4 Friedrich Hayek, Practitioner of Social Justice

  5 Sixteen Principles of Catholic Social Thought: The Five Cs

  6 The Five Rs

  7 The Six Ss

  THE POPES ON SOCIAL JUSTICE

  8 Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum

  9 Forty Years Later: Pius XI

  10 American Realities and Catholic Social Thought

  11 Centesimus Annus: Capitalism, No and Yes

  12 Benedict XVI and Caritas in Veritate

  13 Pope Francis on Unreformed Capitalism

  FURTHER CHALLENGES

  14 A New Theological Specialty: The Scout

  15 Needed: A Sharper Sense of Sin

  PART TWO In Practice

  by Paul Adams

  Introduction Getting beyond Dichotomies

  16 Conscience and Social Justice

  17 Marriage as a Social Justice Issue

  18 Practicing Social Justice

  19 From Charity to Justice?

  20 Charity Needs Caritas—So Does Social Justice

  Epilogue Social Justice: In the Vast Social Space between the Person and the State by Paul Adams and Michael Novak

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE PERSON WITHOUT WHOM THIS BOOK WOULD NOT EXIST IS Elizabeth Shaw, who managed the master text of a multitude of drafts and redrafts, as we labored on our separate parts of the book. She also incorporated all the suggestions and corrections offered by other readers over several years and from several locations. In addition, she made countless creative suggestions of her own.

  Two friends with long experience in Rome, Rocco Buttiglione and Andreas Widmer, were especially helpful in offering corrections and suggestions in several key chapters.

  Many other close readers caught errors, raised pointed questions about ambiguities, and caused us to do much rewriting. Among these were Paul’s colleagues Gerald Gillmore of the University of Washington and Gale Burford of the University of Vermont, as well as five especially impressive students at Ave Maria University: Sarah Blanchard, Angela Winkels, Catherine Glaser, Peter Atkinson, and Monica Bushling. Nor can we forget the insights and suggestions of Mitch Boersma of the American Enterprise Institute.

  Finally, our thanks go out to Roger Kimball and his team at Encounter Books, most notably Katherine Wong and Heather Ohle.

  As Tiny Tim said, “God bless you, every one!”

  Introduction

  Paul Adams

  THE DEFINITION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE HAS RECEIVED LITTLE serious attention for two related reasons. From one perspective, developed by Friedrich Hayek in the most compelling critique of the term to date, social justice is a mirage.1 It is meaningless, ideological, incoherent, vacuous, a cliché.2 The term should be avoided, abandoned, and allowed to die a natural death, or else killed off in a few paragraphs, but it does not merit a book-length critique. Hayek himself did not follow this logic; he wrote a sustained critique of the concept rather than dismissing it out of hand, and, we suggest, he was an exemplar of the virtue in his own public life.

  From another perspective, the political and ideological force of “social justice” may be seen—by critics as well as some calculating proponents—as useful in its functional vagueness. Sometimes a term is helpful in politics precisely because it is vague. For example, “maximum feasible participation” became an important part of the War on Poverty because it was unclear and no one could agree on what it actually meant.3 Social justice is a term that can be used as an all-purpose justification for any progressive-sounding government program or newly discovered or invented right. The term survives because it benefits its champions. It brands opponents as supporters of social injustice, and so as enemies of humankind, without the trouble of making an argument or considering their views. As an ideological marker, “social justice” works best when it is not too sharply defined.4

  So why attempt a level of precision in defining and using the concept when such a project is, according to one view, unachievable and, according to another, politically unhelpful to those who use it most?

  ONE RECENT EXCEPTION to the lack of serious consideration of social justice that is neither partisan nor dismissive is Brandon Vogt’s book, Saints and Social Justice.5 Vogt expounds Catholic social teaching by describing the lives of exemplary saints who dedicated themselves to God and to the common good through works of mercy and efforts to improve the lot of the poor and oppressed.

  Michael Novak and I also emphasize social justice as virtue and aim to recover it as a useful and indeed necessary concept in understanding how people ought to live and order their lives together. We seek to clarify the term’s definition and proper use in the context of Catholic social teaching. We discuss its application in the context of democratic capitalism, in which, we argue, social justice takes on a new importance as a distinctively modern virtue required for and developed by participation with others in civil society.

  On this last point we believe Vogt falls short. He sees social justice as a universal category independent of time and place. The popes after Leo XIII treat “social justice” as a new virtue, necessary for dealing with a new era in social history, and for countering the dread threat of secular, atheistic, and collectivist social movements such as “Socialism” as they understood it. In the twentieth century, as Leo XIII feared, those movements overran huge stretches of the world. They rode roughshod over the transcendent dimension of the human person. They also violated many basic human rights, such as the right to personal economic initiative, to property, to association, to personal creativity, and the liberty to speak openly and honestly, to worship publicly, and to maintain the integrity of the family against the state.

  This larger social struggle evoked the call for a new social virtue, at first called “social charity” and then, with more permanence, “social justice.” Thus the concept social justice is far larger and more sharply focused than the evangelical Beatitudes and their admirable expression in the lives of the saints. In a sense, the virtues of the saints did take root in individual persons and flower in their beautiful lives; and, indeed, they also contributed to the common good, whether at local or at wider levels. But the depth of the mo
dern social crisis requires a nontraditional—a “new”—response to new and unprecedented ruptures with the agrarian, more personal world of the past. National states became vastly larger, more powerful, and far more intrusive (abetted by new modern technologies) than any traditional authorities of the past. “Citizens” gained greater responsibilities than the “subjects” of the kings and emperors of the past. As Leo XIII and Pius XI grasped—and later popes elaborated, extended, and revised—the new “social justice” required modes of analysis, reflection, and action never possible before.

  I CAME UPON the issue over many years as a social-work educator, helping prepare students to practice in a profession that defined social justice as a core value. Social work’s accrediting body holds all bachelors and masters social-work programs accountable for incorporating social justice into their mission and goals and for assuring that students achieve competency in this area.6 So, in this field at least, “social justice” calls out for clarification and cannot be so easily dismissed as it might be by economists.

  My own search for coherence and precision in a “core value” that could also guide practice aimed at the common good led me to the work of Michael Novak. Here was the Catholic philosopher, theologian, and social critic who had given the most serious public attention to the concept of social justice. Throughout his career, Novak had sought to discern how we should order our lives together so that the most poor, oppressed, and vulnerable could thrive. He sought to “promote human and community well-being,” 7 in the language of social work’s accreditation standards, though, like me, he had been led by an overwhelming weight of evidence and experience to reconsider what actually furthers this purpose.8

  Novak sought to rescue social justice from its ideological uses and to define and use the concept in a way that met four criteria. First, it should be consistent with Catholic tradition and the social encyclicals. Second, it should take account of the new things of the modern age, both the breakdown of traditional patterns of work and family and the American experience of democratic capitalism. Third, it needed to withstand the criticisms of those who considered the concept to be irretrievably incoherent. Fourth, it must be nonpartisan, and recognize both left and right (and other) uses of the specific habits and practices that constitute social justice rightly understood, namely, skills in forming associations to improve the common good of local communities, nations, and indeed the international community. Both left and right may compete to see who better accomplishes the common good in specific areas.