Preface vii
Part I Social Justice: The Basics
1 Why We Need a Theory 3
2 The Machinery of Social Injustice 14
3 The Scope of Social Justice 27
Part II Equality of Opportunity
4 Why Equal Opportunity? 37
5 Education 46
6 Health 70
7 The Making of the Black Gulag 95
Part IV The Cult of Personal Responsibility
10 Responsibility versus Equality? 131
11 Rights and Responsibilities 142
12 Irresponsible Societies 154
Part V The Demands of Social Justice
13 Pathologies of Inequality 169
14 Wealth 186
15 Jobs and Incomes 200
16 Can We Afford Social Justice? 215
Part VI The Future of Social Justice
17 The Power of Ideas 233
18 How Change Happens 243
19 Meltdown? 251
20 Justice or Bust 261
Notes 274
Index 311
Brian Barry is Lieber Professor of Political Philosophy at Columbia University.
“A brilliant polemic against inequality.”
Roy Hattersley, The Guardian “Barry's pugnacious defence of a
robust social democracy deserves to find a wide readership ... for
disillusioned social democrats, Why Social Justice Matters stands
as a refreshingly staunch and intelligent manifesto.”
New Statesman “Barry's writing is extremely engaging. His arguments
are supported by a wide range of examples and illustrations and an
impressive breadth of scholarship.”
Ethics and Social Welfare “This book is a powerful argument against
the utter inequity of the current political and economic system in
the UK and against the way in which a discourse of ‘equal
opportunities’ is used to maintain what Barry describes as the
‘machinery of injustice’. In this extraordinarily simple and lucid
book, Barry weaves striking threads of supporting evidence,
anecdotes, quotations and statistics together to encourage us to
insist that another (just) world is not only possible but that an
unjust world cannot endure.”
British Journal of Sociology “Barry persuasively argues that
differentials in positional goods allow the rich to have better
personal health due to higher self-esteem, better access to more
fulfilling jobs due to a wealth of social connections, and greater
ability to capture the government and use it to secure their own
interests.”
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