ABSTRACT
Sociology can inform our efforts to change the world, but it should make us cautious. If we’re going to think better about social justice, we need to embrace humility. This means recognizing that we might be wrong about how the world works, and it means acknowledging that people who disagree with us aren’t necessarily immoral or evil. And if we’re going to pursue social justice with humility, classical liberalism allows for this better than any competing political system. Recently there have been attacks on liberalism from both the left and the right, and while sociology can’t tell us whether liberalism is good or bad, it can help us to clarify our thinking and to see the flaws in many attacks on liberalism. Critics of liberalism tend to ignore sociological knowledge about the world, deny the necessity of tradeoffs, or engage in other errors in thinking about social justice. Social justice activists and scholars sometimes portray liberal institutions as incompatible with social justice, but for now those institutions seem to be its best protectors.
