Conceptualizing Politics

Further readings
Along with the chapters on liberty (by Mario Ricciardi, 149–160) and equality (by Ian 
Carter, 161–170) in Besussi, Antonella, ed. (2012) A Companion to Political Philosophy, Farn-
ham: Ashgate, a critical contribution to the two concepts of liberty is:
Carter, Ian (2012) Positive and Negative Liberty, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003, 
available at http://plato.stanford.edu. Updated, 2007, 2012.

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The two categories we are dealing with in this chapter are much less intertwined 
than liberty and equality in the previous chapter. Justice is usually seen as the queen 
(Iustitia in Latin) of normative political philosophy and is not expected to have a 
good neighbouring relationship with solidarity. Solidarity may stand up as a critic, if 
not an opponent, of justice: the ‘and’ between the two terms is sometimes replaced 
with ‘vs.’ In mainstream textbooks of political philosophy, solidarity has no business, 
whereas justice reigns like emperor Charles V (1500–1558) of the Holy Roman 
Empire, on whose lands, which included the bi-continental Spanish Empire, ‘the 
sun never set’.
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The centrality of justice is partly due to its position as a meta-category. We can 
speak of liberty, equality and solidarity in descriptive terms by saying that a country 
has the highest degree of freedom, a society has a low degree of equality, or the 
population of a town shows a remarkable degree of internal solidarity. This leaves 
open to choice and debate whether or not we appreciate freedom in full measure 
or think it should be subjected to conditions, or believe that a higher level of equal-
ity would compromise the economic efficiency of a country. On the contrary, if we 
say that a society or regime or institution is just, we cannot but issue an axiological 
statement that is attributing a certain moral or political value to it according to our 
value system. Moreover, the axiological charge of statements of justice easily trans-
lates into prescription: what is recognised as just, must be enacted by agents. The 
predicate just/unjust can never be descriptive, as it is, by its nature, evaluative. What 
we, according to our particular value system, recognise as just or unjust remains to 
be seen: for racists it is just to exclude people with another skin colour from societal 
life and government; for other people this is utterly unjust and despicable. Justice is 
not by itself a magic word that guarantees universal respect and recognition.
In §1 a grid of possible meanings of justice is offered, while in §2 we look into 
the most popular example of distributive justice together with its most refined 
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