Other thinkers associated with this approach include Augustine, Aquinas, Rousseau, and, partly,
Marx. Contrary to those who insist that this approach is no longer useful, one can also find any
number of justice-seekers among contemporary theorists, including Strauss, Arendt, Rawls,
Sandel, and Barry.^5 In fact, one can find some form of a justice-seeking approach in virtually every
treatise or tract penned by a political theorist.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that every theorist engaged in normative political inquiry is
exclusively preoccupied with justiceper se. Theorists who adopt a normative approach to politics
frequently seek out other political“goods”or principles besides justice, including happiness, liberty,
equality of rights, duty, economic security, fairness, etc. We should also note that some“justice-
seekers”take issue with reducing all political values or virtues down to one principle: justice. Justice is
one, but only one, of many equally valuable political values orgoods. Nor should justice, they remind us,
be confused with morality. That said, however, the meaning of justice, like the meaning of a good life, is
fungible enough to accommodate many political values and, no doubt, many theorists have associated
“justice”with what they value. All justice-seekers, despite their vastly different interpretations of what
exactly ails modern society, are convinced that the thrashing out of ultimate political choices, while in a
very real sense is the concern of all human beings, is the social function of political theory.
Still, does not“the thrashing out of ultimate political choices,”a student will inevitably ask, result
in disagreement on what makes an individual or a society just? Consensus among justice-seekers
indeed may be more apparent than real. They do not always agree among themselves as to what
makes asociety just or whether justice for individuals is always the same as justice for their society–
a problem Plato wrestled with in theRepublic. Marx, for example, regarded Plato’sRepublic“as an
Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system.”^6 Not only is there disagreement among
justice-seekers over what constitutes justice, but there is even less consensus over how exactly we
achieve justice or other political goods that are, or can be, identified with it.
While the differences among justice-seeking theorists should not be minimized, they never-
theless“bear certain family resemblances,”^7 and these resemblances are most discernible in their
treatment of experiences and facts, which, for them, are not meaningful unless they can be tied to a
moral standard whose source may be natural or divine–and sometimes both. For those who
embrace the normative approach, all political inquiry is, and ought to be, value-laden. Theirs is a
statement of what ought to be, of values forcefully articulated, or opposed. What matters are that the
values we choose (or that they choose for us) be right. For a justice-seeking thinker values are not
reducible to personal judgments. They are better understood as principles that must be valued if
people are to live as they should.“True politics,”justice-seeking theorists are convinced,“must first
do homage to morals.”^8 These justice-seeking theorists would, if they could, introduce a morality
into the world that was not there before, or if it was, has been lost.^9 The purpose of a justice-seeker’s
inquiry, as initiated by Plato, is to identify genuine political virtue, justice, and the good life as
opposed to the conventional imitations of them.
Implicit and, often explicit, is the contention that the present conduct of human beings leaves
much to be desired, which brings us to another shared characteristic among justice-seeking
theorists. The fact is that political theorists who adopt this approach, even those with conservative
proclivities, find little comfort in things as they are. Looking at the world around them, these
political theorists usually begin their tracts with a vision of “the human predicament.”^10
The seminal works of theory have been a response to political crisis, or are, as Hobbes put it,
“occasioned by the disorders of the present time.”Athens’“unquiet times”in the fifth centuryBC,
Italian disunity during the fifteenth century, the great schism within the Catholic Church in the
sixteenth century, the English civil wars of the seventeenth century, the“critical period”following
the American Revolution and the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution in the late eighteenth
century, the farm-labor unrest throughout the nineteenth century, the fall of kings and czars,
economic collapse, and the rise of dictators in the last century (with more to come) are often, for the
justice-seekers, symptoms of“a deeper malady in society.”^11
154 Ramona June Grey