Democracy and Social Justice

The principles that we use to evaluate social and political institutions have affinities for one another whose precise nature is hard to establish. We sense that a person who holds a particular principle of freedom, for example, ought for consistency's sake to hold corresponding principles of authority, equality and so forth, but we are hard put to it to explain what ‘corresponding’ means here. My intention in the present paper is to examine what kind of connections may exist between the principle of democracy and various principles of social justice, and in doing so to throw some light on the evolution of liberal thinking from the classical liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modified form of that doctrine that is prevalent in the West today. I shall try to show that changes in the liberal theory of social justice have been intimately connected to changing attitudes towards democracy as a form of government.