Friday 30 December 2022

Social Justice

The phrase "social justice" draws its roots from Christian theology, with the first noted use occurring in the early 1840s in "Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact", 1840-43, by Luigi Taparelli. Taparelli was an Italian Jesuit priest writing during the rise of Risorgimento, a 19th-century Italian nationalist movement, and debates around the unification of Italy. This work, was translated into German, French, and Spanish in the nineteenth century, but never into English!

Natural Right is a synonym for Natural Law. Much of the European Enlightenment (~1640 to ~1790) criticised and deconstructed previous Christian Natural Law; it a major preoccupation of the earlier (17th century) philosophes. Ealier Christian Natural Law (17th century) had become a totalizing conception of the world and humanity's place in it. The Christian conception of Natural Law was whittled down by the philosophes as they compared each part of it with empirical reality to refute Natural Law which contradicted reality until there was little left over. So 50 years after the Enlightenment ended (1840's) it's fitting that Christians would revise Natural Law, and base the revision "on fact". AKA: provide an empirical foundation for this Natural Law: Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact

It's weird that a 180 year old book giving the intellectual roots for social justice is still not translated into English!, despite current popularity of social justice; dominating Left and Institutional thought today. This is slack. I'd have thought there'd be no limit to wannabe translators! A neutral observer might even think The Powers That Be don't want us plebs to read about the origin social justice. Kind of like how the Church made sure plebs were unable to read The Christian Bible for centuries by preventing its translation into everyday languages.

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