ABSTRACT
The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made. ‘Social justice’ has in practice become simply the slogan used by all groups whose status tends to decline – by the farmer, the independent craftsman, the coal miner, the small shopkeeper, the clerical worker, and a considerable part of the old ‘middle class’, rather than the industrial workers on whose behalf it was first raised but who have in general been the beneficiaries of recent developments. Even moral philosophers often appear simply to allow in the emotions inherited from the tribal society without examining their compatibility with the aspirations of the universal humanism that they also champion. Most people indeed will watch with regret the decline of the small group in which a limited number of persons were connected by many personal ties.
