Introduction

Abstract

Candid though this confession is, its aim is certainly far from being attained. Most obviously, it has not become a general conviction that social justice is, as Hayek suggests, “intellectually disreputable, the mark of demagogy or cheap journalism”.² On the contrary, in our time we are witnessing the growing importance of the concept of social justice, in public consciousness, in political discourse and in philosophical discussions. With growing economic affluence, people realize more clearly the inequities of the social distribution of material goods, educational opportunities and life chances. They question established patterns of distribution of social goods more impatiently than ever as they see the extent to which the human condition is permeated with unjust schemes. When a society is viewed not as an impersonal and incomprehensible force which imposes at random burdens and benefits upon its members, but rather as a realm of conscious and rational action, injustices which were previously taken as ‘natural’ lose their traditional justification and call for social remedies.

In the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, F. A. Hayek states:

I may, as a result of long endeavours to trace the destructive effect which the invocation of ‘social justice’ has had on our moral sensitivity, and of again and again finding even eminent thinkers thoughtlessly using the phrase, have become unduly allergic to it, but I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term ‘social justice’.¹