Social Justice Activism

FAMILIES IN SOCIETY • Volume 83, Number 4
equal, they will not [justly] receive equal shares; indeed,
whenever equals receive unequal shares, or unequals equal
shares, … that is the source of quarrels and accusations”
(p. 123). Yet, like Plato and many other philosophers and
political leaders over the past 2,000 years, Aristotle did not
regard people as fundamentally equal. His view of equality
and justice applied only to those individuals who occupied
the same stratum of a hierarchical social order—for
Aristotle, this meant Athenian men of property. This interpretation
of justice rationalized the coexistence of slavery
or oppression for the many with a democratic polis for
the few (Campbell, 1989).
Universal concepts of justice first appeared between
1,500 and 2,500 years ago in the teachings of most of the
world’s great religions,
such as Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, and Buddhism,
and in Western literature of
this period, such as the
Greek tragedies of Sophocles
and Aeschylus. The
idea of one universal or allpowerful
deity became
linked with the pursuit of a
divine vision for humankind,
one in which
universal justice was attained,
either in this life or
the afterlife. Ironically, as these religions evolved, religious
institutions and religiously sanctioned hierarchies emerged
that undermined this initial conception of justice. In addition,
the exclusivity and competition among proponents
of different religions—increasingly linked to states or empires—further
undermined the ideal of justice for all. In
this context, it is not surprising that the reemergence of
the concept of justice in Western societies occurred concurrently
with the growth of secular humanism and the
spirit of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(Gay, 1966; Israel, 2001). In the early modern period,
this conception of justice was initially used to rationalize
the consolidation of state power under the authority
of absolute monarchs.
Like Aristotle, the foremost proponent of this perspective,
the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1996), regarded
the construction of an external authority—the
state or leviathan—as an essential ingredient in the maintenance
of a just society. This was not because he considered
government the embodiment of the collective will of
people who were naturally just, but because he viewed humans
as antisocial and driven by their baser instincts—an
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, however, the gap between the
ideal of social justice and the reality of
persistent inequality and injustice became
more apparent …
idea that still resonates in the early twenty-first century. In
Hobbes’s conception of justice, the state would create and
enforce laws and social norms to preserve peace and restrain
individuals from harming each other in the pursuit
of their self-interests. This view of justice complemented
perfectly the emergence of commercial and industrial capitalism
(van Mill, 2001; Isbister, 2001). Through the Elizabethan
Poor Laws it shaped Western models of social
welfare to the present, particularly in Great Britain and
North America.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
idea of justice was strongly connected in the West to the
scientific revolution (which sought to discover universal
nonreligious truths) and the Enlightenment (which
sought to apply these scientific
discoveries to society
and its institutions). As part
of their structural analyses
of society, political philosophers
during the “age of
revolution,” such as
Rousseau (1754/1994),
and their nineteenth century
successors constructed
a series of metanarratives
that explained the persistence
of injustice. To a considerable
extent, the frameworks
they constructed over two centuries ago shaped the
formation of most modern institutions in the West,
including the relationship between the state and social
welfare (Roemer, 1996).
The great political and social revolutions of the late
eighteenth century also contained a revolutionary idea of
justice. Both explicitly and implicitly, the pursuit and realization
of social justice were now inextricably linked to the
preservation of individual liberty or freedom, the achievement
of equality (of rights, opportunities, and outcomes),
and the establishment of common bonds of all humanity
(fraternity or mutuality). Both the American and French
revolutions linked their social justice goals with the “pursuit”
or “the perfection of happiness” (Saint-Just, de,
1968, ed.). In theory, this required the creation of societies
that would maximize both individual and collective
well-being. Through such documents as the American
Declaration of Independence and the French Universal
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, social justice
became the unwritten linchpin of so-called “natural
rights” that, in rhetoric if not reality, would now be applied
to all people.
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