Abstract

The call to struggle for social justice mobilizes progressive institutions, movements, and traditions that share nothing else. Progressives lacking any other ideological, religious, political, or cultural basis of commonality join together to make gains toward social justice, sometimes registering the historic limitations of this term by renaming it "eco-justice" or eco-social justice. The idea of social justice arose in the socialist and labor union movements of the mid-nineteenth century and was appropriated in Catholic and Protestant social teaching. Essentially it was shorthand for the new meaning of distributive justice that emerged in response to the exploitation and severe inequality of the capitalist...