Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.

• Author: Bonett, Derek

Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America

Noah Rothman

Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2019, 256 pp.

The "social justice" mo The "social justice" movement has provided endless oxygen for right-wing media programming. Indeed, many libertarians are inclined to view the budding cottage industry of books, Youtube channels, and Patreon pages devoted to denouncing "social justice warriors (SJWs)" and their ilk as merely the latest conservative fever dream: the Huns are not braying at the gates of Western Civilization. We are not Rome in the 5th century. But into this saturated market steps Noah Rothman with his book Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. Far from a conservative overreaction to a troubling-but-trivial trend confined to college campuses, Rothman makes the case that the modern "social justice" movement represents a threat to our most fundamental institutions. Riotous uproars on college campuses are but the most theatrical, made-for-TV epiphenomena of this broader and dangerously corrosive ideological crusade.

What, exactly, is "social justice"? To Mr. Rothman, it is an idea with a long intellectual pedigree, whose first modern incarnation appears in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Remm Novarum. Therein, social inequality was conceived of as a tolerable and indeed natural condition, stemming inevitably from interpersonal inequalities in talents and capacities. The mere fact of inequality does not prevent justice from obtaining. Rather, when those divinely endowed (might we say "privileged"?) with greater capacities fail to exhibit noblesse oblige and instead prey upon and exploit the less fortunate, the state is justified in intervening to ensure a harmonious cooperation between the plebeians and the patricians. Such intervention was a prophylactic against tire twin evil of socialism, which sought to eradicate the natural inequality between men and thus obliterate their divinely sanctioned property rights. Social justice, in this context, might entail a welfare state, support for labor movements, or regulation of working conditions and benefits--but emphatically not the outright acquisition of the means of production by the state.

This Catholic conception of social justice was transformed by John Rawls into a secular schema widely known for its "veil of ignorance" thought experiment. Stripped of any divine injunction and premised instead on "publicly accessible" reasoning, this iteration of social justice was...