For most of Western intellectual history, justice was a virtue exercised by individuals—specifically, by judges, rulers, and citizens acting in accordance with established law. The Latin formula suum cuique tribuere, to render to each what is due, anchored the concept firmly within a juridical framework. Justice was something you did, not something a society had. It described a quality of action, not a pattern of distribution.

Yet by the late twentieth century, the dominant usage of justice in political discourse had shifted dramatically. 'Social justice' now named a standard for evaluating entire institutional arrangements—the distribution of wealth, opportunity, education, and life chances across a population. This was not merely an expansion of the old concept but a fundamental reorientation. Justice migrated from the courtroom to the social structure, from individual virtue to systemic evaluation.

This semantic transformation is among the most consequential in modern political vocabulary. It enabled entirely new forms of political critique: the claim that a society could be unjust not because any particular agent acted wrongly, but because the aggregate pattern of distribution failed to meet a defensible standard. Tracing how this conceptual shift occurred—through what historical pressures, rhetorical innovations, and theoretical reformulations—reveals how a single word's changed meaning can restructure the boundaries of legitimate political argument. The archaeology of 'justice' uncovers nothing less than the conceptual preconditions for modern redistributive politics.

The classical understanding of justice, from Aristotle through the Roman jurists to the medieval scholastics, was anchored in a specific logical structure. Justice was a relational virtue—it governed what one person owed to another within an already constituted normative order. Aristotle's distinction between distributive and corrective justice in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics established the terms that would dominate for two millennia. Distributive justice allocated common goods according to merit; corrective justice restored equilibrium after a wrong. Both presupposed a prior standard—political rank, legal entitlement, contractual obligation—against which 'what is due' could be measured.

Crucially, this framework made justice dependent on antecedent norms. The just judge did not invent the standard; he applied it. The Roman formula codified in Justinian's Digest—iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi—defined justice as the constant will to render to each his right. The possessive pronoun is decisive: suum, his own. Justice presupposed that rights were already assigned. The concept was fundamentally conservative in its semantic structure, confirming and enforcing a distribution rather than questioning it.

Thomas Aquinas synthesized this inheritance with Christian theology, locating justice among the cardinal virtues and distinguishing it from charity. Justice was what was owed; charity was what was given freely. This distinction mattered enormously. To call something a matter of justice was to assert an obligation, not merely to commend generosity. But the scope of obligation remained bounded by existing legal and social relationships. The poor might deserve charity; they could not, within this conceptual framework, claim that poverty itself was an injustice.

The early modern natural law tradition—Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke—introduced important modifications by grounding rights in nature rather than positive law. Yet even here, justice remained fundamentally commutative: it governed transactions between identifiable parties. Locke's theory of property, for instance, established what individuals were entitled to through their labor, and justice consisted in respecting those entitlements. The question of whether the overall pattern of holdings was just or unjust was simply not a question the concept was equipped to pose.

This is the essential point for understanding the later transformation. Classical justice was agent-centered, norm-dependent, and backward-looking—it asked whether specific acts by specific agents conformed to specific standards. It was not a concept for evaluating social outcomes. The semantic infrastructure necessary for such evaluation did not yet exist. To ask whether 'society' was just required conceptual resources—a notion of society as an agent-like entity capable of distributing goods, a standard independent of existing entitlements—that the classical vocabulary deliberately excluded.

Takeaway

Classical justice was structurally conservative: it could enforce existing distributions but lacked the semantic resources to question them, because the concept presupposed that entitlements were already rightfully assigned.

The decisive conceptual mutation occurred in the nineteenth century, though its preconditions accumulated gradually. The key enabling factor was the emergence of 'society' itself as a concept—not as a mere aggregate of individuals, but as a structured totality with its own dynamics, laws, and distributional patterns. Once political economy, sociology, and statistical science made visible the systematic character of inequality, the question of whether that system was just became articulable for the first time.

The phrase 'social justice' appears to have entered sustained use in the 1840s, notably in the work of the Sicilian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, who deployed it within a neo-Thomist framework to argue that the social order as a whole must conform to principles of right proportion. But it was the secular social reformers—Mill, the Fabians, the social liberals of the late nineteenth century—who gave the concept its characteristic modern inflection. Mill's argument in Utilitarianism that the sentiment of justice extends to evaluating social institutions marked a crucial widening. Justice was no longer only about individual desert but about institutional design.

What made this extension conceptually radical was its implicit break with the suum cuique tradition. Classical justice asked: has this person received what is already theirs by right? Social justice asked: is the pattern itself—the way rights, opportunities, and resources are distributed across the population—defensible? This inversion transformed justice from a backward-looking, entitlement-confirming concept into a forward-looking, structure-evaluating one. It was no longer parasitic on prior norms; it became a standard for judging those norms.

The conceptual innovation was inseparable from its political context. Industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of mass poverty as a structural rather than individual phenomenon created the experiential basis for the new usage. When poverty could be attributed to identifiable systemic causes—wage labor, land enclosure, market dynamics—rather than individual failing, the vocabulary of injustice migrated naturally from the courtroom to the factory, the slum, and the political economy. The social question demanded a social concept of justice.

Yet the extension was fiercely contested from the start. Conservative and liberal critics argued that 'social justice' was a category error—that justice properly applied only to individual acts, not to emergent social patterns for which no identifiable agent was responsible. Hayek would later crystallize this objection, calling social justice a 'mirage' precisely because it attributed injustice to outcomes that no one intended. This critique, whatever its merits, reveals the depth of the semantic rupture. The new usage of justice violated the grammatical rules of the old concept, which is exactly what made it politically transformative.

Takeaway

Social justice became possible as a concept only when 'society' became visible as a structured system rather than an aggregate of individuals—the conceptual innovation required both a new subject (society as distributor) and a new standard (pattern evaluation rather than entitlement confirmation).

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) represents the most consequential attempt to provide the extended concept of social justice with rigorous philosophical foundations. Rawls did not invent social justice, but he gave it a systematic architecture that transformed it from a polemical slogan into a theoretical framework with determinate content. The difference principle—that inequalities are justified only if they benefit the least advantaged—offered a precise criterion for evaluating distributive patterns, replacing the vague nineteenth-century appeals to fairness with a philosophically defended standard.

Rawls's conceptual innovation was methodological as much as substantive. The original position and the veil of ignorance were devices for generating principles of justice independently of existing entitlements. This was the decisive move. Classical justice took existing rights as given and asked whether they were respected. Rawls asked what distribution rational agents would choose before they knew their place in the social order. Justice was thus reconstructed as a foundational standard—prior to, and capable of evaluating, the entire institutional structure of society.

The Rawlsian systematization provoked a cascade of conceptual counter-moves that collectively mapped the new terrain of justice discourse. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) reasserted the classical, entitlement-based conception: justice was a property of individual transactions, not aggregate outcomes, and any patterned distribution was incompatible with liberty. The Rawls-Nozick debate thus staged the underlying semantic conflict explicitly—structural evaluation versus transactional entitlement—as a direct philosophical confrontation.

Meanwhile, communitarian critics—MacIntyre, Sandel, Walzer—challenged Rawls from a different direction, arguing that justice could not be theorized abstracted from particular social meanings and shared understandings. Walzer's Spheres of Justice proposed that different social goods (healthcare, education, political power, money) have distinct distributive logics, and that justice consists in preventing any one sphere from dominating others. This pluralized the concept further, suggesting that 'social justice' was not one principle but a family of context-dependent standards.

The post-Rawlsian landscape reveals something important about conceptual change. Once justice was successfully extended to evaluate social structures, the debate shifted irrevocably. Even Rawls's critics—Nozick included—were compelled to argue on the new terrain, offering alternative theories of distributive justice rather than simply denying its coherence. The concept had been transformed so thoroughly that retreat to the purely classical meaning was no longer a live option in mainstream political philosophy. The semantic shift, once accomplished, restructured the space of possible argument. This is perhaps the clearest illustration of Koselleck's insight that conceptual change is not merely a reflection of social change but a condition for it: the availability of 'social justice' as a concept made certain political claims thinkable, and its philosophical systematization made them defensible in ways that permanently altered the terms of political debate.

Takeaway

Rawls did not merely theorize social justice—he made the classical, entitlement-only conception of justice philosophically untenable as a complete account, forcing even his libertarian critics to engage on distributive terrain they would previously have refused to recognize.

The transformation of justice from individual virtue to structural evaluation is not a story of simple expansion or progress. It is a story of conceptual rupture—a moment when an ancient word was repurposed to do fundamentally new work, enabling political arguments that its original semantic structure was designed to foreclose.

What makes this case exemplary for Begriffsgeschichte is the clarity with which it demonstrates that conceptual change is never merely linguistic. The emergence of 'social justice' required an entire constellation of preconditions: the visibility of society as a system, the statistical documentation of structural inequality, and eventually a philosophical apparatus capable of generating distributive standards independent of existing entitlements.

The concept's persistent contestedness—from Hayek's 'mirage' to contemporary debates over redistribution, recognition, and reparation—is not a sign of failure but of vitality. It marks the site where fundamentally incompatible visions of political order continue to collide, each articulated through competing claims about what justice properly means. The word endures; its meaning remains the terrain of struggle.