Justice and Its Surroundings

by Anthony De Jasay

Book Overview

Anthony de Jasay breaks new ground with Justice and Its Surroundings--a collection of trenchant essays that seek to redefine the concept of justice and to highlight the frontier between it and the surrounding issues that encroach upon it and are mistakenly associated with it.

This straightforward and terse book analyzes the roles of collective choice, redistribution, and socialism and the claims that would enlist justice...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865979774
• ISBN13: 9780865979772
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Amagi
• Length: 351 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 to 10 years
• Grade Range: Postsecondary to Grade 5

Customer Reviews

Understanding Justice

Justice and Its Surroundings is fascinating. de Jasay's style is clear and straightforward; which, given the bad writing so common among political scientists, is amazing. Students of libertarianism and admirers of Rothbard and Mises will be delighted.

Justice and Its Surroundings

(excerted from The Independent Review, Summer 2003)Justice and Its Surroundings is an unusually rich, provocative, and wide-ranging work, to which a short review cannot do, well, justice.Admirers of the state argue that various goals can be achieved only via the coercive power of government. To meet such arguments, libertarians must show either that the goals in question are not worth pursuing, because they are undesirable or impossible (the "icky-goal response"), or that however worthwhile the goals may be, state power is not necessary for achieving them (the "needless-means response"). In part 1, de Jasay offers a needless-means response to the claim that the state is necessary for the provision of social order. After explaining social order as a model of a prisoner's dilemma, arguing against the idea that the state must provide public goods, and exploring the claim that the state is a precondition of social order, de Jasay concludes that the problem with stateless social orders is not that they are inherently unworkable, but rather that "states stop them from emerging, and intrude upon them when they do emerge" (p. 15). It is difficult to know what moral the anarchists among us should draw from this conclusion. On the one hand, de Jasay brings us the cheery news that social order can be maintained without a state. On the other hand, he observes more gloomily that stateless social orders have not succeeded in holding their own against predatory states. Is protection against the state, then, one good that markets have trouble supplying? One would like to hear more from de Jasay about this apparent instance of market failure.De Jasay devotes parts 2 through 4 to examining claims that state power is needed to provide redistributive justice. Here the icky-goal response predominates. Against the "to each according to (blank)" approach to justice popular among redistributionists, de Jasay defends the more traditional conception "to each his own." He is at his weakest, however, when advancing this position on moral grounds. Owing perhaps to his quaintly positivistic conviction that moral judgments are "neither true nor false" and so do not admit of "intersubjective validity" (p. 143), he has trouble taking seriously, and indeed has a tin ear for, the kinds of concerns that motivate egalitarian liberals. By contrast, he is at his strongest when showing that redistributionist proposals cannot achieve the goals their proponents claim to desire.In part 5, de Jasay examines Amartya Sen's argument that the Pareto criterion clashes with libertarian values because it allows the voluntary transfer of liberties that are properly inalienable. De Jasay comes down on the side of Pareto, arguing that the (epistemologically grounded) presumption of liberty extends to the liberty to give up one's liberties. I found this section less persuasive. For inalienability theorists, the question is not whether one should be allowed to surrender certain libert