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We have seen that the neo-liberal sees social justice as the mistaken and illusory value distinctively pursued by Social Democrats. In this chapter the details of the neo‐liberal critique are examined in detail and again are found to be wanting. The argument of the chapter is that there is no reason at all to reject the ideal of social justice whether for philosophical reasons as set out in Chapter 4 or for reasons of its alleged baleful effects set out in Chapters 6 and 7. If the critique of social justice fails, as this chapter argues that it does, then the critique of Social Democracy is equally undermined.

It is a central thesis of neo‐liberalism that social justice is an incoherent moral ideal and should play no part in proper identification of the real purposes and scope of the state. Social justice is central to both Social Democracy and Socialism and the critique of social justice is crucial for the neo‐liberal claim to differentiate itself in a categorical way from these other political, social, and economic positions. The chapter looks in detail at the different arguments used by neo‐liberal thinkers to criticize social justice. It is also part of the neo‐liberal position that social justice as a policy aim cannot be made compatible with the idea of the rule of law. The reasons for this are explored in detail.

This chapter explores the social engagement of campus evangelicals. Drawing on ethnographic field observations and survey data, it focuses on InterVarsity’s Urbana student missions conference, a gathering that drew 23,000 young evangelicals to St. Louis in 2006. Although InterVarsity promotes some conservative positions, it is increasingly progressive on issues of poverty, the environment, and race. In assessing InterVarsity’s social engagement, this essay will highlight the multivocality of its social justice rhetoric. Among campus evangelicals, social justice means different things to different people. Though much of this rhetoric has a progressive feel, conservatives are also speaking up. Many have embraced an alternative definition of social justice, shifting the conversation away from inequality and the redistribution of wealth. Focusing on human trafficking, some have confined themselves to a legal understanding of injustice. Still others have emphasized local and decentralized strategies for fighting poverty. Far from a monolith, evangelical campus ministries embrace multiple and conflicting models of social engagement. Instead of placing InterVarsity on the Christian left, it is more helpful to highlight the tensions in evangelical discourse.

This chapter examines how the Muslim question intersects with the question of equality. In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls outlined a plan for justice among peoples. The Law of Peoples focuses primarily on one difference and division, that between Islam and the West. Rawls gives an imagined example of a non-liberal Muslim people he calls Kazanistan. In Rawls' account, Muslims are the antithesis of liberalism. The chapter considers how the identification of Islam with hierarchy (albeit “decent” hierarchy) in Rawls' Kazanistan forecloses one of the most powerful critical challenges raised by the Muslim question: the question of equality. It also discusses Sayyid Qutb's views, articulated in Social Justice and Islam.

This chapter focuses on lone parents, a group that, it argues, has represented a challenge for policy makers in the UK for three decades or so. It notes that under New Labour, the ‘lone parent problem’ is constructed primarily as one of benefit dependency and poverty, and the policy response is to get more lone parents into paid work through a mix of encouragement and compulsion. It demonstrates that the latter has intensified overtime, with the point at which lone parents' receipt of out-of-work benefits becomes conditional on seeking work shifting from when their youngest child turns 16 (the situation prior to 2008), to when their youngest child turns seven (the situation at October 2010). It observes that the construction of lone parents as a social threat was a dominant perspective under the Thatcher and Major Conservative administrations, and it suggests that under the influence of The Centre for Social Justice and its problemisation of family breakdown in particular, this perspective is at risk of re-emerging.

In this chapter, Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd give new reasons for attending to pedagogical training in literary studies classrooms. With so many English majors planning to enter secondary classrooms of their own, Butler and Boyd highlight the potential impact that combining social justice and content knowledge pedagogies can have on generations of classroom learners. At the same time, they claim that including teaching methodologies in undergraduate literature courses builds pedagogy as a habit of mind for all undergraduates, encouraging them to consider issues of social justice in their readings, and how those issues might be effectively conveyed to others.

This chapter examines the developments of rural policy in Great Britain in the context of international economic, social, and political trends. It evaluates the achievements of New Labour's rural policy against the internationalist aspirations of the party's Commission on Social Justice in 1994. The findings indicate that while its macroeconomic policies have fostered continuous growth, New Labour's economic policies for rural areas remain stubbornly agricultural and outdated.

The theory and practice of Ernesto Che Guevara exemplifies the nexus of dispositions and a broadly conceived notion of education within and beyond formal schooling. A revolutionary, Guevara was also a pedagogue much interested in promoting specific dispositions in youth and in the Cuban population as a whole. Dispositions are at the heart of his idea of creating the new man and woman (el hombre nuevo). They would be of a qualitatively new nature because of the “values, commitments, and professional ethic” that would guide their actions in society. We live in different times than Guevara, but the injustices he struggled against are still with us, and his goal of creating human beings to create and take advantage of a democratic, participatory, and cooperative society are still before us. Transnational social justice seems less like a politically charged phrase and more like a burning necessity.

This chapter explores the potential for teaching Welty’s works in conjunction with works by other authors, musicians, and filmmakers in an interdisciplinary class on Social Justice in Literature and Culture. Strategies are examined for teaching “A Worn Path” alongside Ernest Gaines’s story “The Sky is Gray” and the film The Great Debaters and for teaching “Where is the Voice Coming From?” in conjunction with other artistic responses to the Medgar Evers murder by James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, and Margaret Walker. When teaching Welty’s works alongside literary and cultural texts that have played key roles in American civil rights and social justice movements, Welty’s voice emerges as one among many diverse voices concerned with these causes; and her unique methods of engaging with the political through her fiction are perhaps better understood as one thread within a tapestry of artists dedicated, each in their own way, to the cause of justice.

Judgments about risk of harm raise issues of profound moral significance. This chapter criticizes prevailing assumptions about risk management in pregnancy. While bioethicists tend to focus on beneficence when analyzing issues of risk, beneficence does not exhaust the moral significance of risk and judgments about risk also raise issues of social justice. The chapter begins by highlighting criteria for adequate understanding of social justice as transcending the distribution of harms and benefits standardly thought to constitute justice. The chapter then considers how culture shapes the normative significance of risk: how we think about risk, what measures we feel justified taking to manage risks, whose interests are promoted by various approaches to risk, whom we hold responsible and for what. Moving beyond criticism, reforms of cultural attitudes toward pregnancy and its management are proposed and recent claims that “fetal origins” research provides a basis for such reform are assessed. This chapter argues that recognition of the significance of social determinants of health plays a critical role in transforming the management of risk in pregnancy. Overall, the analysis engages foundational philosophical questions about the nature of social justice in concert with attention to cultural context.

This concluding chapter reexamines the Cyber Left against the backdrop of informational capitalism and history. Through this lens, it discusses indymedia as a precursor to Occupy Wall Street and many of the emergent social movements that have developed since the economic crisis of 2008. It also explains how the core logic and strategy of the Cyber Left played a significant role in the inability of the Global Social Justice Movement to build long-term power. It identifies four interrelated, core problems: (1) a retreat from class and capitalism as analytic and political categories; (2) a tendency toward technological determinism; (3) an anti-institutional bias; and (4) no emphasis on political education and leadership development.

The collapse of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) armed irredentist campaign in February 1962 led to the cessation of its military activities against the Northern Ireland state. The Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) sought to highlight discrimination ‘against the Catholic section’ in housing and jobs. Invariably the close relationship between the CSJ and Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) was compromised by the presence of right-of-centre individuals involved in the Dungannon-based organisation. The Northern Ireland Labour Party's (NILP) close ties to the British Labour Party (BLP) were used by Terence O'Neill to beat the local party in the 1966 election. The effects of Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association's (NICRA) radicalism on the NILP were significant. The role played by the NILP in the civil rights movement is addressed. The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a revitalised sectarian brinkmanship on the streets of Northern Ireland.

The AZAPO decision of the South African constitutional court was extremely controversial, both within and outside of south Africa because it supported conditional amnesty for those who had committed violent crimes in the name of their politics, and at the same time removed such individuals from the reach of civil liability. The constitutional court did so in the name of the mandate of reconciliation and social justice, and argued that conditional amnesty was necessary for the avoidance of civil war and for the new dispensation to survive in South Africa. Key to their argument was that their judgement was consistent with the African ethic of uBuntu, which they argued provides an important understanding of why vengeance always turns against itself, and leads to further violence and hatred.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to describe and analyze the logic that drives left-based social movements. The book maps the underlying logic of a new figure of resistance—a new sociopolitical formation—as it has materialized across the world. It undertakes this mapping exercise through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the Global Social Justice Movement from 1994 to 2006, with a particular focus on the indymedia movement. It argues that historical and sociocultural patterns connect different periods of political protest. Specifically, it argues that the patterns of struggle in a particular period are best understood as developing, in an ideal sense, through a multilateral dialogue between social-movement actors and both the past and present. The chapter then introduces the term Cyber Left, suggesting that that we are on the cusp of a new stage in left-based social movements. This is followed by an overview of the two parts of the book.

This chapter examines and contextualizes Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine of property and social justice, which he articulated at a time of deep social conflicts in Egypt. The chapter describes how Qutb, along with other writers concerned with economic inequality in the 1920s–40s such as Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) and Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri (1895–1971), conceptualised private ownership as a form of power that must be limited by religious obligations and subordinated to the public good. The chapter further shows that Qutb made this notion of restrained property central to a broader theory of social justice and wealth redistribution by combining the social teachings of the Qur’an with the modern ideal of the centralized interventionist state. Arguably this endeavour to revitalise the Quranic roots of Islamic charity and simultaneously appropriate the discourse of modern statehood made Qutb’s position oscillate between legalism and anti-legalism.

This chapter argues that obligations of global justice reach out not just beyond the borders of the nation state, but also within it. Undocumented migrants pose legal and ethical challenges to the liberal welfare state, in terms of their access to public provided welfare, particularly health care. The legal challenge arises because a human right to health is embodied in international law, and I argue that states are in breach of their legal obligations if they withhold public health care from undocumented migrants. The ethical challenge arises because human rights are grounded on a conception of human flourishing, and the right to health is crucial not only to that flourishing but also to basic capabilities. To deny irregular migrants access to healthcare is to do them a fundamental moral wrong.

This chapter demonstrates how the hosiery union's important but heretofore forgotten efforts played a key role in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and important labor legislation, major New Deal programs like public housing, and labor feminism. These achievements are bracketed by two major strike waves--under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 when they negotiated the Reading Formula, and under the Wagner Act in 1937 when the Apex strike led to the Supreme Court decision in support of labor, Apex v. Leader. Using the hosiery union as a microcosm of national trends, it also suggests reasons some top CIO officials gravitated toward a top-down structure, increasingly in the orbit of the Democratic Party, while another group struggled to maintain a democratic, bottom-up organizational structure--and what this meant for women and social justice unionism.