Justice

Abstract

No systematic account of political ideas can omit a discussion of justice whether the interests of the author are in the field of value-free conceptual analysis or in that of the appraisal and recommendation of laws, policies and institutions. Moreover, it has been the practice in traditional political theorising to combine both activities. The earliest and most famous systematic treatise on political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, was significantly both an enquiry into the ‘true nature’ of justice and a construction of an ideally ‘just’ state against which existing empirical states could be evaluated.