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Democracy and Social Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

David Miller
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Extract

The principles that we use to evaluate social and political institutions have affinities for one another whose precise nature is hard to establish. We sense that a person who holds a particular principle of freedom, for example, ought for consistency's sake to hold corresponding principles of authority, equality and so forth, but we are hard put to it to explain what ‘corresponding’ means here. My intention in the present paper is to examine what kind of connections may exist between the principle of democracy and various principles of social justice, and in doing so to throw some light on the evolution of liberal thinking from the classical liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modified form of that doctrine that is prevalent in the West today. I shall try to show that changes in the liberal theory of social justice have been intimately connected to changing attitudes towards democracy as a form of government.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 See my ‘The Ideological Backgrounds to Conceptions of Social Justice’, Political Studies, XXII (1974), 387–99Google Scholar; and Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).Google Scholar

2 For an expansion of this contrast, see the works cited in the previous footnote.

3 I do not suggest that this is the only reason for the change in conceptions of social justice, but it has certainly weighed heavily with some liberals, as we shall see later.

4 I shall not even consider the exclusion of women, taken for granted by almost all liberals until quite recently, since this raises special problems of its own.

5 See, for example, Hamburger, J., Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961)Google Scholar, Chap. 2 on the philosophical radicals' view of ‘the people’.

6 See Woodhouse, A. S. P., ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent, 1951)Google Scholar; Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), Chap. 3.Google Scholar

7 Macaulay, T. B., Speeches on Politics and Literature (London: J. M. Dent, n.d.), p. 430.Google Scholar

8 Spencer, H., ‘Parliamentary Reform: The Dangers and the Safeguards’ in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883), Vol. II.Google Scholar

9 Woodhouse, , Puritanism and Liberty, p. 58.Google Scholar

10 Cited in Aulard, F. V. A., The French Revolution (London: Unwin, 1910), Vol. I, p. 181.Google Scholar

11 Woodhouse, , Puritanism and Liberty, p. 82.Google Scholar

12 Woodhouse, , Puritanism and Liberty, p. 83Google Scholar. There has been a lively dispute both over the Levellers' consistency in excluding various categories of people from the franchise, and over the meaning they attached to the term ‘servant’. See especially Macpherson, , The Political Theory of Possessive IndividualismGoogle Scholar, Chap. 3, and ‘Servants and Labourers in Seventeenth-Century England’ in his Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 207–23Google Scholar; Laslett, P., ‘Market Society and Political Theory’, Historical Journal, VII (1964), 150–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, K., ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’ in Aylmer, G. E., ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972).Google Scholar

13 Cited in Thompson, E., Popular Sovereignty and the French Constituent Assembly 1789–91 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952), p. 57Google Scholar. On Barnave more generally, see Miliband, R., ‘Barnave: A Case of Bourgeois Class Consciousness’ in Meszaros, I., ed., Aspects of History and Class Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 22–48.Google Scholar

14 Macaulay, , Speeches, p. 3.Google Scholar

15 Bagehot, W., ‘Parliamentary Reform’ in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot (London: The Economist, 1974), Vol. VI, pp. 208–9.Google Scholar

16 Cited in Aulard, , The French Revolution, Vol. I, p. 181.Google Scholar

17 Cited in Spiegelberg, H., ‘Accident of Birth: A Non-Utilitarian Motif in J. S. Mill's Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXII (1961), 475–92, p. 489CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Several other relevant passages from Mill are cited in this article.

18 On the development of Mill's attitude towards democracy, see Burns, J. S., ‘J. S. Mill and Democracy, 1829–61’ in Schneewind, J. B., ed., Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 280–328.Google Scholar

19 See Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism: Liberty: Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1964), pp. 215–17.Google Scholar

20 Mill, J. S., Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform in Himmelfarb, G., ed., Essays on Politics and Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 319.Google Scholar

21 Mill, , Utilitarianism, p. 282.Google Scholar

22 On Mill's view of the political role of the classless intelligentsia, see further Duncan, G., Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), Chap. 8.Google Scholar

23 Mill, , Utilitarianism, p. 283. Note that Mill here uses the analogy between a private business and the state to make his point.Google Scholar

24 Mill, , Utilitarianism, p. 288.Google Scholar

25 Mill, J. S., Autobiography. ed. Stillinger, J. (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 153.Google Scholar

26 Rousseau, J. J., The Social Contract and Discourses (London: J. M. Dent, 1968), p. 42.Google Scholar

27 Plamenatz, J., Man and Society (London: Longmans, 1963), Vol. I, p. 431.Google Scholar

28 Marshall, T. H., ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ in Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1963), p. 87.Google Scholar

29 Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 544–5.Google Scholar

30 This is one of the important conditions of preserving self-respect, but it is not by itself sufficient, since self-respect may be undermined by degrading working conditions, racial prejudice and other such factors. Once the value of self-respect is admitted into political argument, it has ramifications that are far wider than at first appears.

31 Cf. the position advanced in Campbell, T. D., ‘Humanity Before Justice’, British Journal of Political Science, IV (1974), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have discussed Campbell's arguments in a forthcoming paper, ‘Social Justice and the Principle of Need’.

32 For some remarks on the kind of provision for need that is consistent with the ideal of citizenship, see Parker, J., Social Policy and Citizenship (London: Macmillan, 1975), Chap. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar