Civil Society and Social Justice: A Prospectus.

• Author: Stoner, James R., Jr.
• Position: Aristotle's "Politics and Ethics" and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Philosophy of Right" - Critical essay

In a recent article about the thought of Antonio Rosmini, one of two nineteenth-century Italian priests credited with coining the term social justice, Robert Kraynak asks

why Rosmini invented the term "social justice" when he had at his disposal similar expressions from Aristotle and Aquinas. They defined justice as the constant will of rendering to others their due, and they viewed justice as the social virtue par excellence because it deals with relations to other people, not merely to oneself. Hence, Aristotle and Aquinas had no need to speak of social justice because the phrase would be redundant. Instead, they divided justice into two kinds: (1) general or complete justice and (2) particular or partial justice. (2018, 25) I have more to say about Aristotie and Aquinas later, but let me now propose to answer Kraynak's question: Luigi Taparelli and Rosmini invented the new term because they had to deal with a new phenomenon uncovered by modern social and political theorists: civil society. This term, civil society, developed among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers in Great Britain and France to describe the commercial order that was emerging in Europe and was soon to encompass the entire world (Shils 1997). Entailed in this description was the recognition that the locus of production was not or was not optimally the household or the estate, but an indefinite network linked together by markets. Moreover, although states were needed to protect rights of ownership and enforce contracts of exchange, the expansion of wealth often depended on commercial relations that crossed state borders, and even within those borders state action was often more apt to suppress than to foster growth. By the time Rosmini coined the term social justice, this newly discovered phenomenon, civil society, already had a new science dedicated to its study: political economy.

In this brief essay, I elaborate on the relation of social justice to civil society by reference to well-known texts, specifically Aristotle's Politics and Ethics and Hegel's Philosophy of Right, commenting on each author's insights and errors. After this secular accounting, I discuss the Catholic Church's attempt to invoke Thomistic natural law in developing its own social teaching, noting the latter's tendency to be swallowed up by Hegelian progressivism. Finally, I sketch a prospectus for thinking about social justice in the context of the modern world.

Aristotle and Economics

Aristotle introduces the Politics according to his genetic method, outlining the stages of human community from the household to the village to the city (polis), which he describes as already the complete community. Although the account at first appears historical, Aristotle makes clear that his point is analytical: the city is actually prior because it is complete, the community that makes possible human happiness. He famously concludes that this priority means the city exists by nature and that man is by nature a political animal (2013, 1252a24-1253a20). The household includes the relations of the family (husband and wife, parents and children) as well as the relation of master and slave. Aristotle's discussion of the latter is notoriously difficult, raising the question of whether slavery is natural (and therefore, presumably, just) or merely conventional and concluding that it is mostly die latter but nevertheless useful, even necessary, for the heads of household to have the leisure for political action (1253bl 5-1255b40). A discussion of acquisition follows the discussion of slavery and is likewise ambiguous or problematic. What Aristotle calls the natural modes of acquisition are either relatively primitive (herding, hunting, fishing, and agriculture) or starding (piracy, including wars to capture slaves). He calls unnatural those modes that depend on the invention of money, such as making a profit from exchange and especially from loaning money at interest; although money itself is not natural, he concedes, it is a necessary invention (1256al-1258b8). The Scholastic tradition read Aristotle's analysis of banking as condemnatory, but within a few lines he appears to endorse a liberal study of money making (1258bl0) and to recommend that cities take note of monopoly practices as a means to secure needed funds (1259a23).

What Aristotle's translators call the "village," which might also be translated as the "neighborhood," is mentioned only briefly in the Politics, in contrast to the household and the city, which are treated at much greater length. Indeed, when explaining that men are political because they are rational and engage with one another in speech about the advantageous, the good, and the just, Aristotle concludes that agreement about these things characterize a household and a city, leaving the village or neighborhood out (1253al9). Is the village where die market is to be found? Perhaps, but Aristotle does not say. Acquisition is part of household management, suggesting the household is the essential locus of trade as well as production, though the city is clearly involved in regulating trade, not least with other cities. Discussing the virtue of justice in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives an account of justice in exchange that remains a classic treatment of the topic (2011,1132b21-1133b29). Like punishment for crime, justice in exchange is a form of "arithmetic justice," where things of equal value change hands. Distributive justice, by contrast, is "geometric" or proportional, where the goods of the city, chiefly honors and offices, are distributed according to desert.

Wealth plays an important role in Aristotle's analysis of political life: it is, he suggests, a valid claim to rule because the city needs equipment, though it is hardly an exclusive claim, much less the highest claim, and the regime ruled by the wealthy, oligarchy, is after tyranny the worst of the six regimes. It is characteristic of Aristotle's realism that he thinks most cities oscillate between democracy and oligarchy, rule by the poor and by the rich, and that he thinks the most practicable political improvement would be to find a balance between them, a mixed regime he calls by the generic name "polity," made stable if fortunes are also mixed so that neither the rich nor the poor predominate, but rather the middle class. Throughout the Politics and the Ethics, Aristotle is clear that acquisition is for the sake of use...