Justice University

Answering the question What is liberalism? is key to understanding the life and times of John Henry Newman, particularly since what has baffled many Newman scholars is the fact that he claimed to be against all forms of liberalism and yet held many opinions and took many positions that people today regard as liberal.   Part of this may be due to the possibility that Newman seems to have had trouble viewing this world as anything other than a temporary stopping place on the way to the next.

We’ve been looking at Woodrow Wilson and his role in eliminating the vestiges of what was once known as “Lincoln Republicanism,” i.e. , a political philosophy that viewed government as being of the people, by the people, and for the people.   The Progressive Party was pretty much the last gasp of the type of Republicanism that replaced the Whig Party and ran Abraham Lincoln for president back in the day.

The failure of the progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to address the issue of widespread ownership of capital resulted in a quarrel between Roosevelt and one of his “trust busters,” Judge Peter S. Grosscup.  As a result, the ownership issue was sidelined during Roosevelt’s administration.   It never became a part of the progressive platform, despite ongoing efforts by Grosscup to focus people’s attention on the critical need to spread out ownership of America’s productive capacity.

Back in 1913 during his first year in office as president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson published a book, The New Freedom .   Concerned about the growing power of corporations and trusts and the abuses of human rights that accompanied it, Wilson contended that the power of the giant organizations must be reined in.   After all, he needed something to convince the electorate that they hadn’t made too big of a mistake in electing him instead of Theodore Roosevelt. . . .

  Yesterday we began our refresher course on social justice.   We looked at what social justice is.   Today we look at what social justice is not, that is, how it is distinguished from individual justice and, especially, individual charity.   This can get a little complex.   The most important thing to realize here is that there is a difference between individual goods and social goods , and thus individual justice and social justice .

  It’s common these days (or any days, for that matter) to read or hear something to the effect that feeding the hungry, paying a living wage, providing healthcare, or any multitude of other things is “social justice.”   Trying to abstract the nature of social justice from such statements or declarations, we reasonably conclude that “social justice” means meeting people’s needs on a large scale, rather than looking after people individually or on a small scale.

The Justice University concept is unique in that it integrates Aristotelian-Thomist principles of the natural law into a social and economic program that is politically feasible and embodies sound business practice.   Its practicality is demonstrated by the success of the “ESOP Revolution,” which today benefits more than 11 million workers in more than 10 thousand companies in the United States alone.   Dr. Norman G. Kurland, a member of the CESJ core group, who was Kelso’s Washington Counsel, was instrumental in helping persuade the late Senator Russell Long of Louisiana to champion the initial enabling legislation for the ESOP.