Social justice: cultural origins of a perspective and a theory.

• Author: Bankston, Carl L., III
• Position: Essay

The term social justice comes up frequently in circles concerned with political and economic policy. Although it is often ill defined, it generally rests on two overriding principles. First, social justice is viewed primarily as a matter of redistributing goods and resources to improve the situations of the disadvantaged. Second, this redistribution is not presented as a matter of compassion or national interest, but as a matter of the rights of the relatively disadvantaged to make claims on the rest of the society. In common usage, the term is rarely taken as expressing a debatable position, but as a statement of a fundamental axiom of value in political and economic life.

Of course, some thinkers have given serious consideration to what a just society may be and to whether it makes sense to talk of justice as a quality of entire societies. However, the late philosopher John Rawls is the theorist most closely associated with the term, and his writings are for the most part consistent with the common understanding. Some version of his theory can arguably be found in most uses of the term social justice, even on the lips of those who have never read him (probably the overwhelming majority of social justice advocates). In this article, I argue that a broadly Rawlsian approach to social justice became prevalent in the late twentieth century because it expressed attitudes shaped by two historical experiences: the rise of a mass-consumption economy and the adoption of the civil fights movement as a model for thinking about social relations. Rawls's book A Theory of Justice (1971) was the formal statement of a broad ideological orientation that these two experiences produced.

Uncovering the sources of a point of view or concept does not constitute in itself a refutation. All ideas, including my own, arise in historical settings and respond to their settings. Looking at political and economic events and trends to understand social thinking can therefore be similar to examining the larger conversation in which someone makes a point or argument. The reasons for looking at the context that gave rise to the currently prevalent concept of social justice, however, go beyond simply clarifying the term. Besides offering an account of the concept's origins, I also attempt here to explain how a highly debatable perspective became accepted in many circles as a basic assumption beyond debate.

Mass Consumption, Keynesian Economics, and the Redistributive Ethic

One of the most notable characteristics of the years following World War II was the dramatic increase in consumption. After the Depression decade and the years of wartime restrictions, the United States entered a period of unprecedented abundance in consumer goods. According to U.S. census data, disposable income per capita in 1950 was $10,210 and personal expenditures per capita $9,424 (in 2009 dollars). Just ten years later, disposable income per capita had risen to $14,499 and personal expenditures per capita to $13,474. By the end of the 1960s, disposable income per capita had shot up to $23,265 and personal expenditures per capita to $21,274 (all figures from U.S. Census Bureau 1970 adjusted to 2009 dollars).

This increase in capacity for consumption was an aspect of rapidly growing production. By the early 1950s, the United States was responsible for 45 percent of world manufacturing output and 18 percent of all exports (Frost 1992). By 1958, economist John Kenneth Galbraith was characterizing the United States as an "affluent society." In this new economy, according to Galbraith, the fundamental issue was no longer how to achieve sufficient production, but how to distribute what was being produced. He argued that the nation was spending too much on private consumption to the detriment of public goods and public interests. Galbraith, later an associate and advisor of President John F. Kennedy, maintained that the production of private consumer goods without government guidance left corporations to pursue profits through advertising to increase demand for luxuries, while roads fell into disrepair and children attended badly maintained schools. This high private consumption also left the poor behind the rest of society. Galbraith proposed steering more investments toward public spending, especially spending for education.

The desire to redistribute goods toward the disadvantaged in a society of mass consumption was consistent with a version of Keynesian economic logic. President Kennedy identified the country's underprivileged segment as an area of increased attention at the beginning of his own administration. When he took office, the nation had recently passed through recessions in 1957 and 1960 that had slowed the remarkable rate of postwar economic growth. In his February 1961 message to Congress on the economy, Kennedy announced an economic recovery plan that would "sustain consumer spending and increase aggregate demand now when the economy is slack." Thus, in a key speech that foreshadowed President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, Kennedy explicitly identified boosting demand through government spending, including spending on the poor, as an economic strategy ("President's Message" 1961).

The following year, in his economic message of January 21, 1962, Kennedy announced his own expectation that rising standards of living should erase poverty. "Increasing in our lifetime," he declared, "American prosperity has been widely shared, and it must continue so. The spread of primary, secondary, and higher education, the wider availability of medical services, and the improved post-war performance of our economy have bettered the economic status of the poorest families and individuals. But prosperity has not wiped out poverty. In 1960, 7 million families and individuals had personal incomes lower than $2,000 [a little more than $14,000 in 2007 dollars]. In part, our failure to overcome poverty is a consequence of our failure to operate the economy at potential" (qtd. in "Goal of Growth" 1962).

Kennedy, then, expressed some of the basic themes that began to turn attention in an economy of high consumption toward the economically and socially marginalized. Private spending could preclude economic slowdowns. Because the poor had the least to spend, government could boost economic growth by improving their spending power and by making targeted government investments that would ultimately bring them in from the margins and create full employment. Following Galbraith's logic, public spending would go toward benefits such as health and training so that human resources could be developed with maximum efficiency. When all were employed and earning incomes, their demand would push the country's productive capacities to their maximum. Kennedy's attention to the poor reflected distributional expectations as well as ideas about the relationship between demand and production. In the land of plenty, there should be no shortages for anyone. Not only must prosperity be widely shared, but it must also completely wipe out poverty.

Boosting the poor's ability to consume had both a demand-side economic rationale and a moral force. The corporations that John Kenneth Galbraith saw advertising luxuries were doing so because they needed to keep demand high. According to the widely held demand-side view, the Great Depression had been, at its core, a crisis of overproduction that ultimately ended through war spending. In this perspective, the federal assistance programs of the New Deal era--including the Social Security Act of 1935 and its welfare provisions (Aid to Dependent Children, Aid to the Blind, and Aid to the Disabled) and the National Housing Act of 1934--were at least in part efforts to stimulate the economy by increasing demand. By the postwar period, it had become the common wisdom that spending drove production and that the poor were those who were least able to spend. As demand-side policies became institutionalized in the U.S. economy, putting the least advantaged into jobs and directly subsidizing them to increase their buying power became ways of ensuring that everyone participated fully in a consumption-driven economy. Because the economy could never be judged to be fully "recovered" until it reached a potential of full employment and the eradication of poverty that it never actually attained, the concentration on raising the standards of those at the bottom would become institutionalized in policy. At the same time, the very abundance of life in the United States made it seem shameful that some individuals enjoyed smaller shares of the general prosperity.

Not all authorities shared this common wisdom of the mid-twentieth century. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz (1963), for...