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21 Cap. U. L. Rev. 877 (1992)
What Is Social Justice

handle is hein.journals/capulr21 and id is 891 raw text is: WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE? MICHAEL NOVAK* Now that you have come back to the university, please take out your blue books. Define social justice. Social justice is one of the terms most often used in ethical and political discourse. It is also a term used with the least care. I have searched in vain for definitions of it. In its fuzziness and warmth, everyone wants to cuddle it. But virtually no one will give you a forthright definition of it. For this reason, therefore, it might be useful to attempt to define it in the light of serious objections against the term, launched by a man who took it seriously, the late Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Prize winner in economics. Hayek was a remarkable man, who was a great practitioner of the true meaning of social justice, even while he denied that such a concept is meaningful. It might also be useful to walk through the history of the term, at least telegraphically, and then try to offer a new definition that may be of considerable importance to public policy in the United States and to our law. In fact, the full development of this new meaning will depend upon our legislators and those who provide the concepts from which they work. Let me begin with the locus classicus of the term social justice. The term was made canonical in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, a time of crisis for the capitalist world. Various authors, European and American, described quite ominously the end of an era and the decline of the West. Hitler was coming on stage in Germany. Mussolini was ruling in Italy. Stalin was staging the systematic starvation of nine million Ukrainians. The occasion of this encyclical was the fortieth anniversary of the first of the papal documents on the social condition of labor, issued by Leo XIII in 1891. The later commemoration took into account what happened between 1891 and 1931.1 Copyright © 1992, Michael Novak. * George Frederick Jewett Chair in religion and public policy; Director of Social and Political Studies, Am. Enterprise Inst. for Pub. Pol'y; M.., Harvard University. L For a fuller account of this history, see MICHAEL NOVAK, CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT AND LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS (2d ed. 1989) first published as FREEDOM WITH JUSTICE (1984). For a fuller treatment of the concept of social justice and its application to public policy, see my forthcoming book entitled THE CATHOLIC ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM (1993), especially chapters 3 and 8.

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