Zygmunt Bauman on the idea of the just society we can all agree on
A hard core evident to all
The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, best known for inventing the idea of “liquid modernity,” left Poland as a dissident in 1968, and three years later became a professor of sociology at Leeds University, and eventually one of the most influential social and cultural thinkers of the last fifty years. This is taken from his book This is Not a Diary.
Bauman argues that we understand justice only through our perceptions of injustice and asks if we should begin
with defining the standard of justice, so that we are better equipped to spot and isolate cases of injustice whenever and wherever they appear (or rather hide). Easier said than done. . . .
[R]easonable people seasoned in the art of argumentation and rhetoric are to be found in each of the camps determined, in a bizarre reversal of Kant’s categorical imperative, to flex the proposed universal standards to make them fit their own anything but universal interests; in other words, to summon the idea of justice to the defence of a particular injustice that rebounds as their privilege.
There is little hope, then, that a debate about universal standards of justice will ever bear fruits palatable to everyone involved and so acquire genuine universality. . . .
Since we start with widely varied experiences and sharply and often irreconcilably differing interests, we are unlikely ever to arrive at an uncontentious model of the “just society.” Unable to resolve the quandary, we can only agree to the solution of a “settlement” — reduced to a hard core evident to all, while being staunchly unprejudiced and resisting the temptation to pre-empt the future twists and turns of the continuing (and encouraged) polyvocal debate.
I’d suggest the following formula as a “settlement” of that kind: the “just society” is a society permanently vigilant and sensitive to all cases of injustice, undertaking to take action to rectify them without waiting for the search for a universal model of justice to be completed.
In somewhat different and perhaps simpler terms, a society mobilized to promote the well-being of the underdog; “well-being” in this case including the capacity to make real the formal human right to a decent life — recasting “freedom de jure” into “freedom de facto.”
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