Some 25 students gathered on Friday for an open session of Prof. Bernard Yack’s (POL) course, “Conservative Political Thought,”  as a part of ’DEIS Impact. The topic under discussion: “Social Justice as a Mirage.”  

Yack opened his class by addressing the fact that “it’s a little strange” to discuss “the most influential 20th century argument about why social justice is something we should be ignoring” as part of the University’s social justice festival. He examined the belief that “social justice is a mirage, an illusion that ... actually undermines justice.” 

The class focused on the proponent of this provocative opinion: the Austrian economic and classical liberal theorist Friedrich Hayek. According to Yack, Hayek’s thoughts stem from a more fundamental philosophical disagreement than contemporary critiques of activism. Unlike contemporary ideological opponents arguing over “one vision of social justice over another,”  Hayek denounced social justice altogether as a futile and, ultimately, harmful pursuit.  

“Even though rejecting social justice sounds like it’s attacking morality, motherhood, Brandeis, it, in fact, is drawing on something more than partisan right-wing rhetoric,” Yack said. “I’ve always tried to remind Brandeis leaders that they’re playing with fire with using social justice as a branding icon, as opposed to justice.” 

Yack explained that Hayek sees the aims of social justice as essentially unattainable — nothing more than a “superstition” — and believes the pursuit of them “is at present the gravest threat to the values of a free civilization.” 

To place this assertion in its historical context, Yack summarized Hayek’s work as an advocate of free-market economic policies and his work alongside famed economist Milton Friedman and other “Chicago School” economists who advocated for limited government intervention in the private sphere. 

“The argument that [Hayek] makes here about the ‘mirage of social justice’ is part of a larger set of arguments he made in about the last thirty years of his life about … the conditions for a market society,” Yack explained. In this, according to Yack, Hayek took the standard conservative line against economic planning one step further. 

“There’s a tradeoff,” Yack said, “between a just distribution and a more productive and equal distribution.” For Hayek, attaining “justice” is both pointless and dangerous. In contrast to other champions of capitalist economics, Hayek did not insist its outcomes were fair. 

“He’s saying that justice and injustice has nothing to do with social order … that we’re making a mistake when we apply the adjective ‘just’ to societies,” Yack said. Rather than societies, individuals determine “justice” and “injustice.” In the analogy of a coin-toss, losing qualifies as a “misfortune,” not an “injustice,” Yack said.

When examining social actions, according to Yack, “we tend not to be as comfortable saying justice is irrelevant … it’s not just a coin-toss,” he said. Hayek disagreed on making such a distinction.

For Hayek, “society is not an actor,” Yack said. To further explain, Yack told an anecdote about the Persian King Cyrus’ learning. In order to make him understand the principles of justice, Cyrus’ mentors asked him whether it was just or not for a “big boy with a little coat” to steal a “big coat from a little boy, yet give the little boy the little coat in exchange,” so that both boys have coats that fit. When Cyrus agreed that the theft is justified his counselors rebuked him. 

The tale’s moral, Yack said, lies in the fact that “justice” (as decreed by Cyrus’ teachers) must permit inequality. Yack pointed out that the larger boy’s act of force also amounts to the same basic unfairness. “Justice is a set of rules … that protect us from each other … the two conceptions of justice that come out of this story are in conflict,” he said. “For the sake of  social justice, to set the order right, you’re going to override  somebody’s consent.” 

To avoid this dilemma, Hayek wanted the rule of law to establish a “fair” society and avoid imposing authoritarian conceptions of how society “should” distribute resources. 

“What Hayek was trying really to do was put us in a situation where we didn’t have to make decisions … how to balance what amounts to two ways of thinking about justice: one that requires coordinating power … and the other which requires creating the power just to keep us from getting in each other’s way,” Yack said.

In a short statement to the Justice, Yack said he hoped “bringing in the most important critique of social justice” would add a new depth “into discussion of social justice.”