Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
3﻽2
Antecedents of Urban Redistributive Justice
The first known attempts in the development of western thought to describe and
justify the principles upon which a city and its politics should operate were created
four centuries before the Christian era in Greece, primarily in Plato's The Repub-
lic (1963) and subsequent works by Aristotle (Barker 1969 ; Hardie 1980 ; Crisp
2000 ). These early works were designed to create a more harmonious, sociable and
good society in the Greek city states. These principles have been built upon, criti-
cized and extended by innumerable subsequent scholars, providing the multifaceted
themes of western political theory and governance. One of these themes deals with
the delivery of justice, but since the terms 'just' and 'justice' have meant different
things to various peoples through time, no universal, trans-cultural meaning has
been accepted as underpinning the idea of 'just', especially in a redistributive sense.
For example, many early societies accepted that justice came from god-given com-
mands, interpreted by rulers to create a harmonious society. In Plato's discussions
of the best way to organize a city-state, Thrasymachus argued that justice should be
seen as being whatever is in the ruler's interest, which became a way of protecting
the existing interests of those in power. However, the final recommended approach
in 'The Republic' was for a rule of wise philosopher-kings. They would dispense
justice evenly throughout the three class system in his ideal state, since only they
had the wisdom to understand the long term interests of the state, whereas demo-
cratic rule was described as leading to the corrupt and short-term interests of the
majority. Other Greek scholars thought of justice in a different way. For example,
followers of the sixth century B.C scholar Pythagoras primarily viewed justice in
a retributive sense. So what a person has done to another should be done to him or
her, a version of the biblical 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'. However,
Aristotle (Crisp 2000 ) in noting that there are many forms of justice, made an im-
portant clarification in his distinction between what is usually translated as 'general
or universal justice' and 'particular justice'. But one must be aware of the problem
of translation, for Barker ( 1969 , p. 362) argued that the Greek word for justice
meant something more than legal concepts, for it included ethnical ideas of our
word 'righteousness'. Aristotle's general justice related to goodness, especially to
one's neighbour and to what is lawful in a state, including what punishments should
be given if transgressions occurred. This is what is called a retributive justice today,
one administered through courts. Particular justice dealt with what is fair and equal,
describing many situations of injustice, such as when a man who takes more than
his share should be seen as grasping and therefore unjust. This has been interpreted
as a kind of redistributive justice, one designed to achieve some equilibrium in a
democratic city state, although another form was related to rectificatory justice,
which the “state seeks to maintain….between one member and other” (Barker 1969 ,
363) Aristotle also argued that there should be a roughly equal division in the al-
location of goods and honours in a city-state among the citizens—although it must
be remembered that these were property-owning males, and did not include those
who were seriously disadvantaged, namely women and slaves. Without such equal
division, Aristotle argued that some citizens will assume they are being unfairly
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