ABSTRACT
There has been a long line of important thinkers, such as Ptahhotep, Hume, Habermas, Plato, and Kant who have pondered on and written about justice. However, since our effort is not to produce a treatise on justice, such as that by Barry (1989), we will have a somewhat more focused approach to the topic afforded to us by our philosophical sociology approach. In general, our discussion will follow from the writings and criticisms of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, as much of the discourse on justice has done since this seminal work was published in 1971. We compare this to African interpretations of justice. Doing so is not an easy task; many books and articles have endeavored to deconstruct Rawls’s attempt to understand justice. However, A Theory of Justice is not one composite or complete theory, but a collection of thoughts and debates—personal and public—that analyzes and theorizes about justice in an “ideal” setting, as a concept of social agreements by citizens acting “rationally” (Rawls 2001: xv-xvi; Wolff 1977). Rawls continued to reevaluate, reconstruct, and synthesize his thoughts on justice for more than 30 years (Rawls [1971] 1999; 1993; 1999; 2001).
