5.Brandon Vogt, Saints and Social Justice: A Guide to Changing the World (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 2014).
6.Council on Social Work Education, “Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards,” accessed March 18, 2014: http://www.cswe.org/File.aspx?id=13780.
7.Ibid.
8.See Michael Novak, Writing from Left to Right: My Journey From Liberal to Conservative (New York: Image, 2013).
9.Andrew M. Haines, “Catholic Social Teaching: Why We Fight,” Ethica Politika (February 6, 2014), accessed March 18, 2014: http://ethikapolitika.org/2014/02/06/catholic-social-teaching-why-we-fight/.
10.Gaudium et Spes, §24.
11.Cf. Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).
12.John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §42.
13.Patrick J. Deneen, “Would Someone Just Shut That Pope Up?” The American Conservative (December 5, 2013), available at: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/would-someone-just-shut-that-pope-up/.
14.Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
15.Cf. Putnam, Bowling Alone; Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
16.Thomas Patrick Burke, The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just? (London and New York: Continuum, 2011).
17.Cf. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, §78.
Chapter 1. Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is
1.Matthew 25:44–46.
2.Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, “Images of Socialism,” Dissent 1, no. 2 (April 1964): 122–38, at 122.
3.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2012), 69–70.
4.Oswald von Nell-Breuning, Reorganization of Social Economy: The Social Encyclical Developed and Explained (New York: Bruce Publishing, 1939), 5.
5.See chapter 9, “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” in The Mirage of Social Justice.
6.John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §13.
7.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 189.
8.Cf. Jerry Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society (New York: Free Press, 1993), 60, 68, 72, 148, 160.
9.See “No. 10” of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet, 2003), 71–79, at 76ff.
10.See “No. 14” of Federalist Papers, 94–100, at 100.
11.See Pius XII, Democracy and a Lasting Peace: 1944 Christmas Message, §47: “A sound democracy, based on the immutable principles of the natural law and revealed truth, will resolutely turn its back on such corruption as gives to the state legislature in unchecked and unlimited power, and moreover, makes of the democratic regime, notwithstanding an outward show to the contrary, purely and simply a form of absolutism.”
12.See, for example, “John Paul II on the American Experiment” (December 16, 1997), accessed March 18, 2014: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/11/005-john-paul-ii-on-the-american-experiment.
13.Cf. Richard W. Garnett, “Positive Secularism and the American Model of Religious Liberty,” Engage 11, no. 1 (March 2010): 126–27, available at: www.fed-soc.org/aboutus/DownloadLibrary?id=2408.
Chapter 2. Six Secular Uses of “Social Justice”
1.G. J. Papageorgiou, “Social Values and Social Justice,” Economic Geography 56, no. 2 (April 1980): 110–19, at 110.
2.Gaudium et Spes, §26.
3.C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), 292.
4.See Maggie Haberman, “Gay Donor: Gay Rights Not Inevitable,” Politico (May 2, 2014), available at: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/tim-gill-a-top-gay-donor-talks-strategy-106265.html; Jay Mandle, “Funding Environmentalism,” Huffington Post (February 25, 2014), available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-mandle/funding-environmentalism__b__4853710.html; and “Largest Anonymous ACLU Donor Reveals Identity and Reaffirms Support for Organization,” available at: https://www.aclu.org/organization-news-and-highlights/largest-anonymous-aclu-donor-reveals-identity-and-reaffirms-support.
5.Randy Sly, “A Catholic College and Abortion Advocates: Here We Go Again,” Catholic Online (May 22, 2009), accessed November 21, 2013: http://www.catholic.org/college/story.php?id=33617.
6.“Gay Minister Claims Discrimination,” Waikato Times, accessed November 23, 2013: http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/509074/Gay-minister-claims-discrimination.
7.Cf. The New Consensus on Family and Welfare, ed. Michael Novak et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1987).
Chapter 3. A Mirage?
1.As even the titles of some of his work indicate: Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation & Liberty (as in Introduction note 1 above); and The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
2.See Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, 62–100.
3.Samuel Gregg and Wolfgang Kasper, “No Third Way: Hayek and the Recovery of Freedom,” in Policy (Winter 1999): 11: “Hayek’s economic propositions are rather simple: that human knowledge is far from perfect; that this is at the root of scarcity; and that the finding and testing of useful skills and knowledge is central to economic prosperity. No human being, Hayek stresses, can know everything. In this regard, Hayek’s greatness as an economist rests on the fact that he restored real human beings to the discipline [of economics], and has raised real questions about economists basing their propositions in the theoretical assumption of perfect knowledge and the fiction that people are anodyne, reactive, automatons who simply maximize and minimize. Hence, the basic supposition of economic planning—that government can know everything required to make correct decisions—is revealed as yet another example of human hubris.”
4.Hayek notes expressly that the Roman Catholic Church especially has made the aim of “social justice” part of its official doctrine, while “the ministers of most Christian denominations appear to vie with each other with such offers of more mundane aims” (The Mirage of Social Justice, 66).
5.Ibid., 96–97.
6.Ibid., 66: “Even though until recently one would have vainly sought in the extensive literature for an intelligible definition of the term, there still seems to exist little doubt, either among ordinary people or among the learned, that the expression has a definite well understood sense.”
7.“The main point of my argument is, then, that the conflict between, on the one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended human order created by a competitive market, and on the other hand those who demand a deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on collective command over available resources is due to a factual error by the latter about how knowledge of these resources is and can be generated and utilized. As a question of fact, this conflict must be settled by scientific study. Such study shows that, by following the spontaneously generated moral traditions underlying the competitive market order (traditions which do not satisfy the canons or norms of rationality embraced by most socialists), we generate and garner greater knowledge and wealth than would ever be obtained or utilized in a centrally-directed economy whose adherents claim to proceed strictly in accordance with ‘reason.’ Thus socialist aims and programmes are factually impossible to achieve or execute; and they also happen, into the bargain as it were, to be logically impossible.” Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 7.
8.Hayek writes scathingly in Mirage of “that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet
outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions” (62–63).
9.Leo W. Shields, The History and Meaning of the Term Social Justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1941).
10.John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in The English Utilitarians, ed. H. Plamenplatz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 225 (emphasis added).
11.Hume’s entire text reads: “Most obvious thought would be to assign the largest possessions to the most extensive virtue, and give every one the power of doing proportioned to his inclination. . . . But were mankind to execute such a law, so great is the uncertainty of merit, both from its natural obscurity; and from the self-conceit of each individual that no determinate rule of conduct would ever follow from it; and the total dissolution of society must be the immediate consequence.” An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sect. III, part II, Works IV, p. 187. Kant’s text reads as follows: “Welfare, however, has no principle, neither for him who receives it, nor for him who distributes it (one will place it here and another there); because it depends on the material content of the will, which is dependent upon particular facts and therefore capable of a general rule.” Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten, sec. 2, par. 6, n. 2.
12.“Individual man may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of conduct, and are capable on occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to their own. They are endowed by nature with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind. . . . Their rational faculty prompts them to a sense of justice which educational discipline may refine. . . . But all these achievements are more difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups. In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the need of others. . . . In part it is merely the revelation of a collective egoism, compounded of the egoistic impulses of individuals, which achieve a more vivid expression and a more cumulative effect when they are united in a common impulse than when they express themselves separately and discreetly.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), xi, and also chapter 1, “Man and Society.”
13.Hayek, The Fatal Conceit.
14.Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, 68–69.
15.Hayek continues: “. . . and any particular conception of ‘social justice’ could be realized only in such a centrally directed system. It presupposes that people are guided by specific directions and not by rules of just individual conduct. Indeed, no system of rules of just individual conduct, and therefore no free action of the individuals, could produce results satisfying any principle of distributive justice” (ibid., 69).
16.Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), vol. 3, The Breakdown, 526 ff.
17.Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, 70. Also: “Yet we do cry out against the injustice when a succession of calamities befalls one family while another steadily prospers, when a meritorious effort is frustrated by some unforeseeable accident, and particularly if of many people whose endeavours seem equally great, some succeed brilliantly while others fail. It is certainly tragic to see the failure of the most meritorious effort of parents to bring up their children, of young men to build a career, or of an explorer or scientist pursuing a brilliant idea. And we will protest against such a fate although we do not know anyone who is to blame for it, or any way in which such disappointments can be prevented” (ibid., 68–69).
18.Ibid., 73: “It has been argued persuasively that people will tolerate major inequalities of the material positions only if they believe that the different individuals get on the whole what they deserve, that they did in fact support the market order only because (and so long as) they thought that the differences of renumeration corresponded roughly to differences of merit, and that in consequence the maintenance of a free society presupposes the belief that some sort of ‘social justice’ is being done. The market order, however, does not in fact owe its origin to such beliefs, nor was it originally justified in this manner. This order could develop, after its earlier beginnings had decayed during the middle ages and to some extent been destroyed by the restrictions imposed by authority, when a thousand years of vain efforts to discover substantively just prices or wages were abandoned and the late schoolmen recognized them to be empty formulae and taught instead that the prices determined by just conduct of the parties in the market.”
19.See Gregg and Kasper, “No Third Way,” 12. They summarize four propositions that characterize Hayek’s thought: (1) The institutions that coordinate society arise largely from human experience, but not human design; hence attempts to design society are fatal to its goodness. (2) In a free society, law is essentially found and not made. Law is normally derived not from the mere will of the rulers, be they kings or Rousseau’s “General Will,” but from the interaction and learning of all citizens. (3) The Rule of Law not only is the first and foremost principle of the free society, but is also dependent on the two previous propositions. (4) The Rule of Law requires all people to be treated equally (i.e., with procedural justice), but does not require them to be made equal, and indeed is undermined by attempts to engineer equal outcomes (i.e., “social” justice).
20.Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, 69–70.
21.Ibid., 73–74: “It certainly is important in the market order (or free enterprise society, misleadingly called ‘capitalism’) that the individuals believe that their well-being depends primarily on their own efforts and decisions. Indeed, few circumstances will do more to make a person energetic and efficient than the belief that it depends chiefly on him whether he will reach the goals he has set himself. For this reason this belief is often encouraged by education and governing opinion—it seems to me, generally much to the benefit of most members of the society in which it prevails, who will owe many important material and moral improvements to persons guided by it. But it leads no doubt also to an exaggerated confidence in the truth of this generalization which to those who regard themselves (and perhaps are) equally able but have failed must appear as a bitter irony and severe provocation.”
22.Ibid., 70–71.
23.Ibid., 73–74: “The competitive prices arrived at without fraud, monopoly and violence, was all that justice required. It was from this tradition that John Locke and his contemporaries derived the classical liberal conception of justice for which, as has been rightly said, it was only ‘the way in which competition was carried on, not the results,’ that could be just or unjust.”
24.Ibid., 79: “But from . . . an appeal to the conscience of the public to concern themselves with the unfortunate ones and recognize them as members of the same society, the conception gradually came to mean that ‘society’ ought to hold itself responsible for the particular material position of all its members, and for assuring that each received what was ‘due’ to him. It implied that the processes of society should be deliberately directed to particular results and, by personifying society, represented it as a subject endowed with a conscious mind, capable of being guided in its operation by moral principles. ‘Social’ became more and more the description of the pre-eminent virtue, the attribute in which the good man excelled and the ideal by which communal action was to be guided.”
25.In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek notes that the word “society” in present parlance not only refers to phenomena “produced by the various modes of cooperation among man,” but it has “increasingly been turned into an exhortation, a sort of guide-word for rationalist morals intended to displace traditional morals, and now supplants the word ‘good’ as a designation of what is morally right. Because of this factual and normative meanings of the word ‘social’ constantly alternate,
and what first seems a description imperceptibly turns into a prescription” (114). To illustrate his point he sums up “an instructive list of over one hundred and sixty nouns qualified by the adjective ‘social’ he had encountered” (115).
26.Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, 69: “‘Social Justice’ can be given a meaning only in a directed or ‘command economy’ (such as an army) in which the individuals are ordered what to do; and any particular conception of ‘social justice’ could be realized only in such a centrally directed system. It presupposes that people are guided by specific directions and not by rules of just individual conduct, and therefore no free action of the individuals, could produce results satisfying any principle of distributive justice.”
27.Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, trans. John Matthews (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Books on Demand, UMI, 1976).
28.See Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, 97.
Chapter 4. Friedrich Hayek, Practitioner of Social Justice
1.See The New Consensus on Family and Welfare, 43–52.
2.See ibid., 71–89.
3.Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” The Wall Street Journal (October 29, 1993).
4.See, for example, the data from the Centers for Disease Control: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18.pdf.
5.Cf. a somewhat less vivid account in Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Intellectual Pilgrims: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1999), 11.
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