Judging from
current literature, lectures, and what-not, “social justice” is just another
name for socialism. Is that really the
case, though, given that, e.g., the
Catholic Church has been extremely supportive of social justice, but “down” on
socialism? Are socialism and social
justice really just different names for the same thing?
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| Pope Pius IX |
Let’s go back to
the early nineteenth century, when socialism was making great gains under the
label “the democratic religion” (socialism only got called socialism in 1833 or
1834, and the term only got applied in a non-pejorative sense in the 1840s),
and was considered a replacement for traditional concepts of religion, both
Catholic and Protestant. “Neo-Catholicism”
and “New Christianity” were euphemisms for socialism throughout most of the
nineteenth century. That was bad enough,
but then the revolutions of 1848 really disrupted the social order.
Faced with a
situation in which needed reforms were impracticable due to the instability of
the social, economic, political, and religious situation — especially in light
of the advances made by socialism and the Neo-Catholic movement — Pius IX realized he needed something new. That was a philosophical approach which, with
Aristotelian-Thomism as its foundation, would be adequate to
address the “new things” of the modern world, a counterpart to Alexis de
Tocqueville’s “new science of politics .
. . for a new world.”[1] This the pope found in the work of Monsignor
Aloysius Taparelli d’Azeglio, S.J. (1793-1862).
 |
| Msgr. Aloysius Taparelli |
Having joined the
Jesuits in 1814, by 1825 Taparelli had become
convinced that only a revival of Aristotelian-Thomism had the potential to counter the subjectivist
philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650) and other philosophical
innovators. Ideas spread by people like
Saint-Simon, Fourier, and, especially, de
Lamennais in his recently published Essai, persuaded Taparelli of the
need to reorient modern thinking to be consistent with the natural law and offer an alternative to moral relativism and irreligious rationalism.
As Taparelli argued,
mistakes by scientists in the natural sciences could have no effect on how
nature operates. Mistakes in philosophy,
politics, and theology, however, have far-reaching consequences in human
society. The Revolutions of 1848
confirmed him in his opinion.
It was in the
late 1840s that Taparelli, a leader in Gregory XVI’s Thomist revival, developed the idea of “social justice” as an alternative to the
socialist democratic religion and
Neo-Platonism of the socialists, particularly de Lamennais. The socialist, modernist, and New Age principle is that all things, including the
natural law, are subordinate to whatever
is desired, especially the amelioration of social conditions. This accounted for the multiplicity of
proposals de Tocqueville noted during the disturbances in Paris.
In contrast,
Taparelli’s social justice principle was that all things, even (or
especially) social improvement and the general welfare, must be subordinate to
the natural law as understood in Aristotelian-Thomism. There are thus absolutes — natural rights
inhering in each human person, such as life, liberty, and private property — that must remain sacred and inviolate,
regardless of the needs of individuals or society as a whole; it is not “expedient
for you that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation perish
not.”[2] Where socialism relies on changing human nature, social
justice relies on changing human institutions.
Taparelli did not take his concept of social justice further; he appears to have construed it as a
general justice, a variety of legal justice more closely aligned with Christian morals and
doctrine than Aristotle’s concept. His idea was that, in addition to a general
intent to benefit the common good when practicing the classic virtues of
prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, there should
also be a general intent to conform to Catholic doctrine and Christian values,
the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity.[3]
 |
| Alexis de Tocqueville |
This concept of
social justice, while an advance on the
socialist rejection of moral absolutes, was still
vague. Taparelli tried to
fit social justice within the existing framework of the classic individual virtues. This led to confusion as to where, exactly,
social justice fell in the classic understanding of the
particular individual virtues of commutative and distributive justice.[4]
Construed as a
form of legal justice, a general virtue, Taparelli’s concept of social justice gave no guidance as to how it worked, other
than that people should be individually virtuous and be guided by the precepts
of the Church, especially charity, in exercising the natural
virtues. It was clear, however, that the
supernatural virtue of charity should not either be redefined as the natural
virtue of justice, nor should charity replace
justice, as the socialists and liberal Catholics demanded.
Together with the
pope’s own interest in reviving Thomism, Taparelli’s work gave Pius IX something to counter socialist proposals and present a theory of social
amelioration consistent with precepts of natural law.[5] In 1850, to promote social justice, Pope Pius IX gave Taparelli and Father
Carlo Maria Curci, S.J. (1810-1891)
permission to found the journal La Civiltà
Cattolica to explain the new idea and prepare the way for sustainable
social reform.
Two other Jesuits, Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892)
and Gaetano Sanseverino
(1811-1865), joined them in the effort.
Taparelli, Liberatore, and Sanseverino had earlier
collaborated in founding Italy’s first scientific journal, La Scienza et la Fede.
So, is “social justice” just another word for
socialism? Hardly: the concept was
developed specifically to counter socialism . . . but the term was so good that
the socialists coopted it, and have managed to control it in many cases down to
the present day.
#30#
[1]
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
Author’s Introduction to Volume I.
[2]
John 11:50.
[3]
Paradoxically, Taparelli was opposed to universal suffrage, as essential to the
functioning of a just social order as widespread capital ownership, which he
appears to have ignored. Rommen traced
this to Taparelli’s erroneous genealogy of universal suffrage, which Taparelli
claimed derived from the Reformation.
Rommen, The State in Catholic
Thought, op. cit., 110, 437.
[4]
The answer is that social justice and all other social virtues do not fit into
the classic individual framework in which individuals act only as individuals
on their own behalf. As Father William
J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. (1905-1985) explained, social justice, in common with
the other social virtues, affects individuals only as members of a group, that
is, institutionally, not individually, on behalf of the group as a whole. See Ferree, The Act of Social Justice. Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America Press, 1942, © 1943; Introduction
to Social Justice. New York: The
Paulist Press, 1948.
[5]
Rommen, The Natural Law, op. cit.,
193.
