ABSTRACT
Justice is used once again in something like its original meaning—the folkways, the actualities of an existent society, but viewed, as folkways of a possessing class. Justice is a noble thing, but painful and difficult; excess and injustice are pleasant and easily acquired, but frowned on by conventional esteem. Plato, like so many modern thinkers since the Renaissance, endeavored to base his theory of the state on a theory of human nature: we are by nature interdependent, each one of us is fitted by nature to do one particular task. This is the central fact in the secret of the origin of society and the justification of justice. The noble savage of Rousseau, the "economic man" of the classical economists, the "economic subject" of Boehm-Bawerk, the "farmer isolated from all the world", or the "inhabitant of the forest primaeval" who forms the starting point of other marginal utilitarian economists; each of these and one other is an isolated man.
