The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

The economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek devoted a substantial proportion of the second volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976) to what he called ‘the mirage of social justice’. In it, he argues that it is a ‘hollow incantation’ and that ‘the people who habitually employ the phrase simply do not know themselves what they mean by it and just use it as an assertion that a claim is justified without giving a reason for it’. He continues: It is not pleasant to have to argue against a superstition which is held most strongly by men and women who are often regarded as the best in our society, and against a belief that has become almost the new religion of our time (and in which many of the ministers of old religion have found their refuge), and which has become the recognized mark of the good man. But the present universality of that belief proves no more the reality of its object than did the universal belief in witches or the philosopher’s stone.