The aim of this volume on “Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe” is, as Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman state, to “put social justice on the map for historians, who, in contrast to practitioners from other disciplines, have hitherto largely eschewed the subject” (p. x). The editors do not claim to offer a compendium. Rather, they intend to provide “a conceptual shape that others might find useful when pursuing the archival work that the subject still necessitates” (p. 28). In outlining this framework, Conway and Erlichman argue that the history of social justice needs to be seen in the context of four broad themes: “the rise of state power”, “the emergence of cultures of social improvement”, the “changing popular expectations of government”, and “the more political domain of citizenship” or, more specifically, the “emergence of a shared culture of social citizenship” (pp. 11–15).
Conway and Erlichman outline three sets of questions that are pursued throughout the volume. First, they point to questions of continuity and change in conceptions of social justice. Such developments, they argue, need to be traced beyond the conventional periodisation of political history. They propose the concept of “regimes of social justice” as an alternative way of constructing a history of social justice. These regimes should be seen as the “result of complex compromises” (p. 24). This leads to a second set of questions concerning actors and agencies. The editors argue that “even the most authoritarian regimes […] could not simply trample underfoot expectations of fairness and material amelioration coming from below” (pp. 26–27). The third set of questions focusses on “spatiality” (p. 24). Conway and Erlichman argue that the history of social justice should be careful not to focus exclusively on the nation-state because conceptions of social justice have often been located in more local social groups, on the one hand, or in transnational communities, on the other.
The volume contains eleven thematic contributions and a short “postscript” by Samuel Moyn focusing on the conceptual history of “social justice”. Most of the chapters are not limited to a single country, but take a comparative or transnational approach. The contributions cover a wide range of European countries. The Balkans and the Baltic countries receive the least attention. Some of the contributions are primarily based on the existing literature, while others present case studies drawing on archival or published sources.
In the course of the twentieth century, political movements and regimes from the far-right to the far-left adopted the language of social justice first put forward by liberals and Catholics in the discourse on the “social question”. Pedro Ramos Pinto argues that Southern European fascism based its approach to the social question on a nationalist and authoritarian form of corporatism. Fascists did not conceive of social justice in the terms of individual rights, but in a “functionalist understanding” as a means of “national regeneration and aggrandizement” (p. 102).
One of the aspects of the volume that seems most promising for future research is the idea that regimes of social justice are shaped by the interactions between rulers and the wider population. This approach could open up interesting perspectives on authoritarian regimes by providing a way of analysing continuities and transformations beyond political regime changes. Radka Šustrová puts this perspective into practice by analysing workers’ reactions to the regulation of labour relations and social insurance in Czechoslovakia under both Nazi occupation and under Communist rule, using court cases and petitions. Both regimes used the institutions of the welfare state and for the arbitration of work-related disputes to inculcate their respective ideals of a just social order in the population, but in some cases, they encountered the “Eigensinn” (p. 132) of the workers. Another perspective on the role of social justice in political transformations comes from Adrian Grama, who argues that the programmes of privatisation devised in the former communist countries of East-Central Europe were influenced in part by considerations that took into account widely held egalitarian notions of social justice.
Several chapters show how malleable conceptions of social justice have been, even when they have become part of official discourse or widely accepted ideals. Daniel A. Gordon traces the emergence of a specific form of welfare chauvinism in Western Europe since the 1960s. He shows how actors from different strands of the political left deployed notions of social justice against immigration by constructing a tension between solidarity and diversity. Sándor Horváth shows how notions of social justice were employed by the socialist regime in Hungary. After de-Stalinisation, the regime recognised that social inequalities persisted under socialism and therefore needed to be addressed through “social policy”. The regime’s views on the role of the market-based “second economy” changed drastically between the 1970s, when it was seen as the culprit of persisting injustice, and the late 1980s. Unable to sustain the welfare dictatorship model, the regime claimed that fairer outcomes, for example in the provision of housing, could be achieved through market-based distribution.
The volume does not aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the debates on social justice in twentieth-century Europe. Therefore, it would be all too easy to pick out topics that are missing (especially if they are one’s own field of research). However, future research might benefit from adding another set of questions to those proposed by Conway and Erlichman. A systematic consideration of how inequalities are legitimised within conceptions of social justice could provide interesting comparative perspectives. This could include a focus on conceptions of merit and deservingness. Throughout the twentieth century, understandings of social justice as equality of opportunity have competed with egalitarian notions.1
My main concern is with the volume’s decision to avoid “establishing a single definition of its subject matter”. The editors argue that social justice “was too plural and too contextual a phenomenon […] to be encapsulated in a fixed manner. Instead, the volume embraces the different ways in which the term, but also the reality, has been understood.” (p. 6) However, if we do not want to limit our research to cases where contemporaries used the language of “social justice” (which some of the chapters do not), we need a precise, but ideally broad and abstract, definition of social justice. Otherwise, we risk basing our research on implicit understandings of social justice that may be influenced by our contemporary political debates or by existing research. In fact, some chapters still read like histories of the welfare state.
For anyone interested in the political and social history of twentieth-century Europe, the volume’s transnational and comparative approach can provide an inspiring read.
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1 Peter Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy. Britain's Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War, Oxford 2020; Alex Hill, Brains, Breeding, and Knowingness. The Politics of Meritocracy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, in: Modern British History 35,3 (2024), pp. 316–334; John Carson, The Measure of Merit. Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940, Princeton 2006.