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Rethinking Social Justice Theory and Action in an Age of Transition

Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith, Rethinking Social Justice: Theory and Action in an Age of Transition. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2026, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0536 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/0536#copyright Further details about CC BY-NC licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/0536#resources Information about any revised edition of this work will be provided at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0536 Paperback: 978-1-80511-933-3 Hardback: 978-1-80511-934-0 PDF: 978-1-80511-935-7

HTML: 978-1-80511-937-1 EPUB: 978-1-80511-936-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0536 Cover image created by Curt Dubois with the assistance of Midjourney, CC BY-NC. Cover design by Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal.

Contents

Author Biographies

vii

Preface

Introduction

PART I. THE ENDS: CONTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

1. Universal Aspirations

The Ferment of Modernity

2. The Discourse on Social Justice

The Underlying Sense of Justice

Premodern Roots

Subaltern Conceptions

Modern Conceptions Global Conceptions

3. Toward a Common Horizon

An Expansive Conception of Contributive Justice

40 73 99

PART II. THE MEANS: RADICAL CONSTRUCTIVE AGENCY

103

4. Violence and Nonviolence

105

Underlying Conceptions of Power

108

Toward a New Realism?

122

Beyond Conventional Politics By Any Means Necessary?

Can Empirical Research Resolve the Debate? 5. Contention and Construction

117 127 149 159

Contentious Politics

159

Untangling the Relationship between Contentious and Constructive Agency

179

Constructive Programs

161

Rethinking Social Justice

6. Rethinking Power and Resistance

Expanding Our Conception of Power

Expanding Our Conception of Resistance 7. Supplanting the Culture of Contest

189

193 199

205

Beyond Contests of Power

205

Our Transitional Era

227

Beyond Us versus Them

Learning Our Way Forward 8. The Bahá’í Experience

220 230 235

Why Look at a Religious Movement?

235

Bahá’í Discourse and Practice

248

Emergence of a Modern Religion Repression and Resilience

A New Type of Social Actor

244 258 261

Summary

269

Appendix A

277

Appendix B

293

Acknowledgements

305

List of Figures

309

Bibliography

311

Index

359

Introduction

The discourse on social justice revolves around two primary questions: What are the ends of social justice we aspire toward?1 And what are the most effective means for pursuing those ends? These two questions and the relationship between them are the focus of this book. On the question of ends, social justice is most commonly understood in terms of whether or not the basic structures of society are just. Today, this question tends to be cast in terms of distributive justice.2 Theories of distributive justice tend to focus on whether the basic structures of society support the fair distribution of social goods such as economic resources, education and employment opportunities, health care and other public services, and rights and freedoms. Sometimes they also account for the distribution of status and recognition, influence and power. And some theories of distributive justice even focus on the fair distribution of social burdens such as taxes, military service, and pollution. These are all significant considerations related to the basic structures of society. But a narrow focus on distributive justice can inadvertently foster a scarcity mindset or trigger a zero-sum bias.3 The pursuit of social 1 2

The claims made in this introductory chapter, and the conceptualizations offered, are elaborated and substantiated with relevant sources in subsequent chapters. Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); David Miller, “Distributive Justice: What the People Think,” Ethics 102 (1992); Serena Olsaretti, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Shai Davidai and Martino Ongis, “The Politics of Zero-Sum Thinking: The Relationship between Political Ideology and the Belief that Life is a Zero-Sum Game,” Science Advances 5, no. 12 (2019); Matilda Hellman, “Justice and Equality as a Zero-Sum Game,” Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 39, no. 1 (2022); Joanna Różycka-Tran, Paweł Boski, and Bogdan Wojciszke, “Belief in a Zero-Sum Game as a Social Axiom: A 37-Nation Study,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46, no. 4 (2015); Daniel Meegan, “Zero-Sum Bias: Perceived Competition Despite Unlimited Resources,” Frontiers in Psychology 1, no. 191 (2010).

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justice thus comes to be viewed as a contest for scarce resources and opportunities, rather than a means of mutually working toward greater abundance and shared prosperity. In distributive contests, any gains by one segment of society tend to be perceived as losses for another segment of society. Thus, in recent years, gains by historically marginalized social groups have provoked a powerful backlash by groups seeking to retain or regain past privileges. Indeed, so powerful has this backlash been that, at the time this book was written, the backlash was leaving many social justice movements disoriented and unsure of how to proceed.4 An expansive conception of contributive justice offers a way forward.5 By contributive justice we are referring to a set of social conditions that enable every individual and group to develop their latent capacities to contribute to the flourishing of the entire social body, from which their own flourishing ultimately derives. Such conditions include distributive justice, but they go well beyond this, as the discussions in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 illustrate. Furthermore, as those chapters illustrate, the concept of contributive justice accords with most people’s deepest intuitive understanding of the social dimension of justice, and it constitutes the broad horizon toward which diverse movements for justice all appear, implicitly, to be oriented. The first part of this book lays out our argument regarding how we can conceptualize and orient toward these ends. On the question of means, the pursuit of social justice is often understood and enacted through contentious politics.6 Contentious 4 5

Jeffrey Alexander, Frontlash / Backlash (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2025); Tracilyn George, Woke or Broken: Understanding the Current State of Social Movements (Toronto: Clydesdale Books, 2025). Though others such as Paul Gomberg, Andrew Sayer, and Michael Sandel have previously theorized contributive justice, as we discuss in Chapter 2, we offer a more expansive conception in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Paul Gomberg, “Why Distributive Justice is Impossible but Contributive Justice Would Work,” Science and Society 80, no. 1 (2016); Paul Gomberg, How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Andrew Sayer, “Contributive Justice and Meaningful Work,” Res Publica 15 (2009); Andrew Sayer, “Habitus, Work and Contributive Justice,” Sociology 45, no. 1 (2011); Andrew Sayer, “Capabilities, Contributive Justice and Unequal Divisions of Labour,” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 13, no. 4 (2012); Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (London: Penguin Books, 2021). Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mark Beissinger,

1. Universal Aspirations

To think coherently about the relation between ends and means in processes of social change, it helps to first clarify the ends. In progressive movements for change today, many interrelated ends can be identified — peace, freedom, equality, dignity, sovereignty, environmental sustainability, and so forth. A compelling argument can be made, however, that the aspiration for social justice underlies or subsumes most if not all of these other ends. Meaningful peace, freedom, equality, dignity, and sovereignty are not possible without social justice. Even environmental movements can be understood in terms of aspirations for social justice. Pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change have disproportionate impacts on marginalized populations, and these impacts are environmental injustices. Similarly, environmental degradation subordinates the wellbeing of future generations to the short-term material interests of current generations, and this is an intergenerational injustice. On all of these fronts, growing aspirations for social justice can be understood as a fundamental characteristic of modernity. In this regard, modernity can be viewed as a period of accelerating movements for transformative social change, driven by these increasingly universal aspirations. Some of these movements arose, initially, under oppressive conditions inherited from feudal Europe. Many more arose later under oppressive conditions propagated globally through the projection of Western political and economic values, ideas, and practices. Of course, Western civilization cannot be reduced only to its most oppressive aspects. It has also given rise to remarkable expressions of human creativity, the advancement of science, and other accomplishments — including increasingly consequential conceptions of social justice itself. Nor has Western civilization had a monopoly on oppression, past or present. Every civilization and culture has embodied oppressive ©2026 Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith, CC BY-NC 4.0

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elements. And those elements have given rise to many historical struggles for social change. But, for the discussion at hand, we turn our attention to aspirations for social justice that have arisen in the context of, and in reaction to, Western modernity. Our purpose is to try to discern a common horizon toward which diverse movements for social justice are all implicitly oriented. In other words, what do we mean by social justice? To answer this question, we first examine the ferment for social justice catalyzed by modernity, as well as the human sense of justice that gives rise to it. In Chapter 2 we then trace the way premodern conceptions of justice gave rise to modern conceptions of social justice, the distributive conceptions that came to dominate Western discourse on social justice, subaltern conceptions that complicate the discourse, and global conceptions that further complicate the discourse. This discussion enables us, in Chapter 3, to discern a common horizon that encompasses the aspirations of diverse movements for social justice: contributive justice. And we conclude by discussing the path of social learning that will be needed to advance toward this shared horizon and addressing the concerns of skeptics regarding the ends of social justice we’ve articulated.

The Ferment of Modernity When Western modernity is viewed as a whole, one can see that it has set in motion an epoch of unprecedented movements for social justice that continue to proliferate worldwide, partly in response to aspects of Western modernity itself. To see this holistically, it helps to consider the successive waves of movements for social justice that have crashed upon the shores of modernity. The earliest of these — though not often understood in these terms — are the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution. These roughly co-terminus movements, though different in so many ways, shared a common aim of overcoming an oppressive religious hierarchy that monopolized the control of faith and knowledge in feudal Europe while buttressing an equally oppressive political and economic aristocracy. By seeking, respectively, to liberate and democratize the practice of faith and the generation of knowledge, the liberalizing and democratizing impulses of both movements later extended across the

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