ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Social Justice, Natural Law and Economic Order: Neo-Thomism and the economists
Author:
co-authored with Daniele Corrado Argument: • Theories of justice in historical perspective • The question of justice in economic and political currents (liberalism, socialism, ...) The notion of ‘social justice’ emerged in political debates in the XIX century. It subsequently began to interest and to be used also by economists. Natural law and the status of political economy as a science have been central to the development of the different approaches to social justice. This concept has been particularly developed by Roman Catholic social economics. It was introduced and developed by a group of Jesuits who elaborated the Neo-Thomistic (or New Scholastic) philosophical thought. ‘Social Justice’ (also ‘legal justice’) was applied to the economic problems of the time and in particular to the social question, but it remained controversial and led to a long debate inside the same adherents to Roman Catholic social economics. In the paper we would like to study the main differences in the use of this concept between economists in the second half of the XIX century. Secondly, we will analyse the connection between the notion of social justice and ‘classical’ natural right from which it was derived. Then we will highlight the debate developed around this concept between the main currents of Roman Catholic social economics and the official adoption in encyclicals. Finally, we will note how subsequent applications were affected by positivistic interpretations of the law and supplied a narrow representation of the problem.
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