Justice Is Conflict - Hardcover

Hampshire, Stuart

3.32

44 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691009333 ISBN 13: 9780691009339

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1999

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This book, which inaugurates the Princeton Monographs in Philosophy series, starts from Plato's analogy in the Republic between conflict in the soul and conflict in the city. Plato's solution required reason to impose agreement and harmony on the warring passions, and this search for harmony and agreement constitutes the main tradition in political philosophy up to and including contemporary liberal theory. Hampshire undermines this tradition by developing a distinction between justice in procedures, which demands that both sides in a conflict should be heard, and justice in matters of substance, which will always be disputed. Rationality in private thinking consists in adversary reasoning, and so it does in public affairs. Moral conflict is eternal, and institutionalized argument is its only universally acceptable restraint and the only alternative to tyranny.

In the chapter "Against Monotheism," Hampshire argues that monotheistic beliefs are only with difficulty made compatible with pluralism in ethics. In "Conflict and Conflict Resolution," he argues that socialism, seen as the proposal of extended political solutions for natural human ills, is still a relevant, yet strongly contested, ideal.

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Review:

Justice is not harmony, but conflict, Stuart Hampshire tells us. No doubt, many readers will find his position hard to swallow, but his arguments are harder to refute. Hampshire, formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a professor at Princeton and Stanford universities, is one of the leading lights of 20th-century philosophy. In Justice Is Conflict, he argues that because conflict presumes openness, diversity, and the questioning of final authority, it can be a safeguard against many kinds of tyranny. When we seek to eliminate conflict, in Hampshire's view, we are acting as heirs to the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition that sets up reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Hampshire wants us to shrug off the claustrophobic blanket of this tradition and embrace Hume's dictum that "reason both is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions."

Hampshire is pointing us toward a new understanding of justice when he hearkens back to what he sees as Heraclitus's picture that "our political enmities in the city or state will never come to an end while we have diverse life stories and diverse imaginations." What's important for Hampshire is not the elimination of conflict, but rather its preservation, moderated by fair procedures. But can procedure ever truly be fair to its participants? In the final two chapters--"Against Monotheism" and "Conflict and Conflict Resolution"--Hampshire turns his attention to procedural justice in modern society. Here he meditates on some of the main threats to and allies of fair procedure. Hampshire's crisp prose and penchant for succinctness render this slim book accessible to a wide audience. Still, there is plenty of philosophical muscle for an academic reader. --Eric de Place

From the Inside Flap:

"Hampshire's contribution to philosophy . . . is highly individual. . . . His work displays a broad and systematic outlook, concerned with bringing together views in the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. . . . His philosophical style is distinctive, a sensitive blend of the argumentative and the exploratory."--Bernard Williams, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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