Justice Is Conflict - Hardcover

Hampshire, Stuart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715629506 ISBN 13: 9780715629505

Publisher: Duckworth, 1999

Synopsis

This text argues that there is an essential analogy between necessary conflicts in the minds of individuals and necessary conflicts in states and societies; and that this is the universal basis of procedural justice. The rational method of resolving these conflicts is the same, but conflict resolution in the state requires institutions, which have their own peculiar histories: hence the variety of outcomes. This is a new basis for political liberalism. It 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 passion, and this search for harmony and agreement constitutes the main tradition in political philosophy up to and including contemporary liberal theory. The author undermines this tradition by developing a distinction between justices 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 institutionalised argument is its only universally acceptable restraint and the only alternative to tyranny.

About this title

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 Back Cover

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Duckworth
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0715629506
• ISBN 13: 9780715629505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 88