ABSTRACT
Social Darwinism takes the founding principles that apply to biology and nature and makes a philosophical, not empirical, equivalency to human societies, as if a society is analogous to an organism in nature. In common parlance, ideology is simply the ideas that undergird a system of thought. These undergirding foundational ideas are typically taken as universal givens from which social, economic, and governmental/political systems are then structured. Social justice is facing a number of problems that were not faced by its 19th-and 20th-century predecessors. Just as modernism laid the groundwork for the individualistic and rational subject, by establishing a social reality loosely based in the natural science, the various threads of postmodernism opened up the door to critique, or rather deconstructed, the notion of self, identity, and even subjectivity—and herein lies the problem for 21st-century social justice. The hidden assumption of current social justice ideology is that it seeks in the end to neutralize all difference.
