Michael Novak & Paul Adams 
Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is 

What is social justice? For Friedrich Hayek, it was a mirage—a meaningless, ideological, incoherent, vacuous cliché. He believed the term should be avoided, abandoned, and allowed to die a natural death. For its proponents, social justice is a catchall term that can be used to justify any progressive-sounding government program. It endures because it venerates its champions and brands its opponents as supporters of social injustice, and thus as enemies of humankind. As an ideological marker, social justice always works best when it is not too sharply defined.



In
Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is, Michael Novak and Paul Adams seek to clarify the true meaning of social justice and to rescue it from its ideological captors. In examining figures ranging from Antonio Rosmini, Abraham Lincoln, and Hayek, to Popes Leo XIII, John Paul II, and Francis, the authors reveal that social justice is not a synonym for “progressive” government as we have come to believe. Rather, it is a virtue rooted in Catholic social teaching and developed as an alternative to the unchecked power of the state. Almost all social workers see themselves as progressives, not conservatives. Yet many of their “best practices” aim to empower families and local communities. They stress not individual or state, but the vast social space between them. Left and right surprisingly meet.



In this surprising reintroduction of its original intention, social justice represents an immensely powerful virtue for nurturing personal responsibility and building the human communities that can counter the widespread surrender to an ever-growing state.

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Paul Adams is professor emeritus of social work at the University of Hawai‘i. He was professor and associate dean of academic affairs at Case Western Reserve University. He has written extensively on social welfare policy and professional and virtue ethics. His recent publications, including
Reinventing Human Services: Community- and Family-Centered Practice (with Kristine Nelson) and articles in the leading social work journals, address the relation of family and informal helping to modern state systems of justice, care, and control.


Michael Novak is distinguished visiting professor at Ave Maria University in Florida, after thirty-two years in the chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. He was the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize, and was on three occasions US ambassador under Ronald Reagan. Novak has written numerous influential books on economics, philosophy, and theology.