From this awareness of a dire or impending crisis, they draw up an indictment against their
society or those who threaten the foundations of their society. As a result, the justice-seeking
theorist appears to be battling against convention, ignorance, stupidity, cowardliness, even human
nature–all that keeps us from drawing closer to“justice,”as he or she defines it. Indeed, there are
times when it seems for them there is never enough justice, let alone the right kind of justice, to be
found anywhere in the world. Undoubtedly influenced by the Athenian trail and execution of his
teacher Socrates, Plato concluded that every actual or existing political regime is a hopelessly
flawed replica of the just regime, every system of governing, including his own practical regime set
out in theLaws, is an imperfect copy of the idealpolis.
That something has gone terribly wrong further demands for the justice-seeking theorist that we
take stock of who (or what) is responsible for our plight; hence, another family resemblance in
justice-seeking theory is theidentification of villains and, potentially, unrecognized heroes. And
here again, political theorists do not uniformly agree on who or what is responsible for our plight
(and, conversely, who or what will redeem us.) Their villains sometimes appearamong us: the
sophists, the inept princes, the bourgeois, the tyrannical majority, or radicalized students (like Plato)
andtheir teachers; at other times, the evil appearsoutsideof us: a weak Leviathan or one that is too
strong, imperial powers, an alien church or creed, absentee landlords, global corporations, and so
forth. Sometimes they will point to the devilwithinus–the human propensity for selfishness, glory,
envy, power (or worshiping those with power), hubris, or failing to appreciate the limits of human
reason. Whether they are seeking a justice that will tame us or liberate us, theorists will move
between both types of villains, within and without.
To have any chance of success (even a partial success) a“just”regime will need to be imposed by
an uncorrupted or“knowledgeable”few. Ordinary folk cannot be trusted to do the right thing, either
because the theorist (for example, Burke) fears that they will abandon the civilizing values and
practices they are familiar with to pursue an idealized world of“abstract”justice, or will accept the
existing world of injustice and may even (as Rousseau feared) prefer servitude over deliverance.
Either way, the“crisis”that the theorist uncovers results not so much from flawed institutional
arrangements, badly executed public policies, or faulty reasoning, but from fundamental errors in
moral reasoning. Exposing such errors is, however, only a necessary but hardly sufficient
beginning.
A path to redemption or“glimpse of a deliverance”is what gives political theory both a timely
and timeless quality. Central to normative or justice-seeking approach in theory is:
an estimation of importance (in public and private life), not in the sense of what is likely to
happen, but of what ought to happen, the discrimination of a better from a worse way, the
conviction that some courses of action are morally obligatory, and the expression of choice or
preference growing from an attitude of desire, of fear, or confidence toward what the present
holds and what the future may bring forth.^12It is not unusual for our“deliverance”from social maladies to take place in an ideal society where
everyone, as Reeve says of Plato’sRepublic,“comes as close to being fully virtuous, and so to
pursuing and achieving genuine happiness, as he can.”^13
This seems to imply that all justice-seekers are utopian, which is false, particularly if“utopian”
presupposes the total restructuring of public and private life. So conceived,utopia, as some theorists
insist, is an illusion–at best, unreal and at worse, dangerous. Whereas some normative theorists
focus on the good society, others–today we usually think of them as liberal justice-seekers–are
content with exploring paths toabetter society. Consequently, if these theorists find a place for
utopia in their world, it is envisioned as a goal (or an aspiration) instead of an actual place, and
change, when it comes, will likely be piecemeal rather than total, prosaic rather than dramatic,
evolutionary rather than revolutionary. They are able to take into account a world where equally
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