As nearly as I can make out, social justice, in contradistinction to either legal or distributive justice, does not refer to any special disposition of the soul and hence cannot properly be regarded as a virtue. Its subject is not the individual human being but a mysterious “X” named society, which is said to be unintentionally responsible for the condition of its members and in particular for the lot of the poor among them.6
This concept makes sense, Fortin continues, “only within the context of the new political theories of the seventeenth century.” These theories shifted attention away from virtue and moral character—where nearly all philosophies had directed attention until then—to newly imagined social structures that would guarantee the security and freedom of atomistic individuals. “As such, it is of a piece with the modern rights theory,” writes Fortin. “On the one side, it departed from traditional theories of virtue. On the other, it used the language of modern natural rights theory, but then stepped quite outside it, in order ‘to equalize social conditions.’” But equalizing conditions, of necessity, dramatically diminishes personal responsibility, virtue, merit, and character.
Like Calvez and Perrin, Fortin notes that the first author to use the term “social justice” was the Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, in his Theoretical Essay on Natural Right from an Historical Standpoint (1840–43). Fortin adds that the influence of this Catholic scholar on Leo XIII can be clearly traced. Taparelli attempted to import the Enlightenment term “natural rights” into Catholic social thought by linking it to a new concept, social justice.
However, according to Fortin, what really laid the groundwork for this new concept of social justice was Rousseau’s view that society corrupts the pure individual. Rousseau (1712–78) reformulated virtually all human problems in terms of the distinction between nature and history, as opposed to the classical distinction between body and soul. Fortin summarizes the consequences:
If society and its accidental structures are the primary cause of the corruption of human beings and the evils attendant upon it, they must be changed. Social reform takes precedence over personal reform; it constitutes the first and perhaps the only moral imperative.
No doubt Fortin is correct about the woolly sloganeering to which social justice has been prey. Even the Communists found “social justice” useful for their propaganda, and socialists and social democrats still use it unabashedly as the generic name for their own program. Since Leo XIII wrote expressly against socialism and the growing state, as well as against the destructive force of “equalizing conditions,” the left has wandered very far from his express intentions.
To rescue the term from ideological misuse is no easy task. The first step is to disentangle the term’s complicated history.
In his careful study, Burke details how Taparelli, as a nineteenth-century “conservative” opponent of classical liberalism and supporter of the old feudal powers, including the Church, viewed social justice in terms of constitutional order and as having nothing to do with economics (on which he also wrote without ever mentioning social justice). Burke also notes the contemporaneous significance of Antonio Rosmini, who, in contrast to Taparelli’s conservativism, developed in The Constitution under Social Justice7 and other writings a Catholic “liberal” understanding of social justice that hinged on the constitutional organization of political life, with principal concern for property rights and, in turn, the condemnation of redistributive economic policies and practices.8
Decades later, in drafting the encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII and Matteo Liberatore, S.J., both students of Taparelli, were faithful to Taparelli’s concept of social justice, particularly in their development of the doctrine of inequality. But forty years after Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, drafted in large part by Oswald Nell-Breuning, who was a student of Liberatore, set aside Taparelli’s views on social justice and inequality, and promoted social justice as economic doctrine. Nell-Breuning’s line-by-line commentary, The Reorganization of Social Economy, treats social justice as both a virtue and a regulative principle. Later usage picks up on the social regulative principle, and ignores the virtue.
In the subsequent debate, where mention is made of “social justice,” no single generally accepted definition has emerged. Messner, in his work mentioned above, explains with considerable mixing of terms that “‘social justice’ refers especially to the economic and social welfare of ‘society,’ in the sense of the economically cooperating community of the state.”9 Cardinal Höffner, in Christian Social Teaching, adopts the position that social justice is the late-medieval “legal justice” which is related to the later German “general justice.” He suggests calling it “common-good justice, a virtue that is exercised only by the state, territorial authorities, professional classes and the Church.”10 Calvez and Perrin, who narrow down the term a bit more than Charles, Messner, and Höffner, conclude that “social justice is general justice applied to the economic as distinct from the political society.”11
A wonderful chapter in a dissertation produced at Boston College by Normand Joseph Paulhus analyzes the theological school that explored the terrain on which the developing concept of social justice would be built. This group in southern Germany, called the Fribourg Union, spurred the widespread discussion of key background issues in the period before Rerum Novarum. Paulhus draws our attention to at least three of them.12
At the beginning of the 1800s, the word “political” dominated discourse, while the word “social” appeared with comparatively less frequency. The slow turning from monarchical to republican forms of government (“democratic” forms in today’s usage) brought more attention to concrete differentials among the demos, the people. Thinkers began to differentiate farmers from city folk: craftsmen, tradesmen, manufacturing workers, and so on. Marx and others supplied political analysis with new theories of class and class warfare. Attention elsewhere shifted to the many “factions” among democratic peoples. The success of the young United States in lifting so many of its in-streaming poor from poverty to property ownership and steady upward mobility created for Europe das Sozialproblem: why was Europe not lifting up its own les misérables? In some discussions, the word “social” began displacing the term “politics,” and was made to seem analytically prior to “political.”
Meanwhile, the analysis of the word “social” was also beginning to undergo a sea change of a different sort. For centuries after Aristotle, man was said to be a “political animal,” and the main method for analyzing polities was to study their laws and their rational principles—the well-formed habits, perspectives, and rules that bound peoples as one. But after Machiavelli (1469–1527), the main method of analysis began to shift away from laws and principles of reason to the will of individuals, a voluntarist energy, and an awareness of the nonrational forces at play in social life: self-preservation, the hunger for power, pride, greed, self-interest, and self-exultation. The “real world” of naked will versus “dreams of reason.”
As the word “social” came into common use, that use increasingly came to be steered down three different tracks. Down one track, “social” became pitted against “individual.” Down another track, “social” (as in civil society and in various traditional and newly arising free associations) was more and more pitted against “state.” As Paul Adams pointed out in his introduction to this volume, excessive attention to the individual on the one side, and to the state on the other, crushed out the space in between them both, the space of civil society and its freely forming associative life.
Down a third track, “social” came to be divided by its basic inspirations: reasoned and law-abiding social energies versus social energies moved primarily (it was said) by passion, will, and self-interest. It was “rationalists” versus “voluntarists,” Aristotelian-Thomists versus Machiavelli and Hobbes.
It was into this complex vortex of contrary meanings and energies that the term “social” came to be paired with “justice.” No
wonder “social justice” became hard to define.
Let us, then, take another cut at the history of social justice. During the nineteenth century, among those driven to use the term “social,” one side favored the tradition of “legal justice” laid out first by Aristotle, and developed more fully by Aquinas. This side gathered wind in its sails from the Thomistic revival (or “scholastic revival”) that gained strength from about the 1830s until its powerful blessing and impulsion by Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris (1879).
As a rival to it, the other side used “social justice” to call for more political activism—activism demanding state coercion, usually to enforce new patterns of redistribution of income via taxation.
Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and theologians such as Nell-Breuning seemingly combined both factions. On the one hand, they promoted the rebirth of the Thomistic tradition, with its praise for thick associational living (as in the guilds and city-states), reason, law, and the virtues guided by practical wisdom. On the other hand, they also felt it necessary to call upon the will of the state to enforce certain social outcomes, such as wealth redistribution and state protections of the vulnerable and needy.
It is not clear that any one thinker in those days foresaw the danger of a growing state Leviathan, using humanitarian motives to justify massive new state powers, even the totalitarian state claiming to speak for “the people.” No one, that is, except Alexis de Tocqueville, who foresaw (and dreaded) the soft despotism which lies always ready to rise up under the cover of false sentimental motives. Few directly will the dictatorial state. But many cherish the sweet comforting desires that feed its rise—and which it falsely promises to satisfy. Presciently, Tocqueville wrote:
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it. . . .
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.13
From “common good” uncritically employed to the false justification of a soft despotism is not so long a step. Similarly for the move from “social justice” to state coercion.
As we have already noted above, the context in which Leo XIII encountered the term “social justice” sprang from one of the most enormous social transformations in human history: the end of the agrarian age that had begun before the time of Christ, and its fairly abrupt entry into an era of invention, investment, factories, manufacturing, urban growth, and city services. No longer did families have an inherited roof over their heads and daily food from their own land. They were uprooted, and now dependent on city dwelling, the availability of jobs, and their own initiative. Traditional social networks were cut to shreds. Associations of a lifetime were torn asunder.
Moreover, two radically opposed social ideals were propagandized during the nineteenth century: on the one hand, the socialism of Marx and those of similar mind and, on the other hand, the apparently radical individualism of Bentham and Mill. (Actually, English life was not nearly as individualistic as the latter two’s abstractions suggested. Among Europeans, the English showed the most striking mutual respect, politeness, and consideration for others, as seen in polite queuing up at bus stops and ticket windows. Theirs was the most genial orderliness.) On the whole, the Continent leaned toward the statist emphasis and away from the model of civil society and respect for the individual. Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum made it his aim to trace a new pathway, closer to the English model of civil society, and veering away from the socialist model.
John Stuart Mill was a great champion of the liberal order (meaning individual liberty and relatively free markets, of the sort that encourage invention). But taking a cue from his wife, he also leaned toward the sort of democratic socialism that he thought would own the future. Mill was a classical liberal in his well-worked-out principles, but in his sympathies he was a social-democratic liberal.
Pope Leo understood that new times demanded a new response. The old social order was fading fast, a new one was swiftly arising—which shape it would take was not yet clear. Since the family, he noted, has always been the most central and intimate institution for handing down the faith, new fractures and stresses in the family demanded that the Church enter into the battle for the shape of the future. The English line of argument would not convince the French or Germans, nor the reverse.
Leo XIII saw that new institutions and new virtues among individuals would be required for new times. He feared the socialist state (for thirteen specific reasons he carefully spelled out). He feared the futile and false idea of equality. And he also feared the ideal of radical individualism, which would eventually, he predicted, drive the undefended individual into the eager arms of the state.
The Rise of a New Moral Imperative
The best way to grasp both the complexity and concreteness of Leo XIII’s thought is to meditate slowly and first-hand on some of his key texts, especially those that spell out long in advance the ill effects that socialism would wreak on the human race. For instance, Leo’s long list of reasons for opposing real existing socialism proved remarkably more accurate in their pessimism than were the rosy hopes of many intellectuals of his time and later.14
Most vividly and at great length Leo XIII diagnosed the evils of socialism. But then he also diagnosed the fatal flaws in the idea of “equality of conditions” that underlies socialism. We must take these up in turn. But it is first necessary to put ourselves into the dilemma of the nineteenth century.
Until that time, it was taken as normal that the vast majority of the world was very poor. “The poor ye shall always have with you.” That brute fact generated no urgency that said that poverty must be overcome. Resignation and acceptance were taken to be the moral imperative. But then, rather abruptly, came the beginning of a new age; new wealth was being created, inventions and discoveries led to a rapid increase in manufacturing and the sp
read of (at first) small factories, the growth of urban areas, and a decline in the primacy of agriculture.
The agrarian age which had ruled for more than two millennia slowly yielded to a new age, based on invention (the pin machine observed by Adam Smith, for example), enterprise, industry, new sources of power (such as the steam engine) and transportation (the railroads), and a massive exodus from the land to swelling towns and burgeoning cities. Families were uprooting themselves; more and more men no longer worked on the fields adjacent to their homes and alongside their families, but in factories that separated them from their families for long hours at a time, at first as long as ten to twelve hours per day, six days a week. Since for centuries the family had been the nursery of the faith, Leo XIII saw that the future of the Church was also at stake, as well as the condition of the working man, and millions of at least partially abandoned women and children.
But Leo also saw, as no pope before him could, that new wealth was being created not on farms, but more and more in industry. Railroads were being built, night lamps lit city streets, new inventions kept arriving yearly. For the first time, poverty in Europe came now to be experienced as a disgrace. Marx had described it as a disgrace, precisely because it stood out in contrast to the unprecedented wealth created by capitalism, but he had overlooked the widespread movement out of poverty in America. Worse still, he had failed to grasp the genius by which new wealth is created from the bottom-up. The same must be said of Leo XIII, too. For the United States presented to the world not only a new model of a republican polity (it was not like the French Republic or the Republic of Venice). It also presented a new model of the dynamic economy. It displayed unparalleled upward mobility. Few in Europe grasped America’s inspirations, methods, and practices.
But Leo did grasp, more generally, the moral obligation of providing material and external help for the poor:
Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is Page 12