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Justice Is Conflict.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 170
EAN: 9780691089744
ISBN: 0691089744
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 120
Publication Date: September 01, 2001
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press
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Editorial Review:
Justice is not harmony, but conflict, Stuart Hampshire tells us. No doubt, many readers will find his position hard to swallow, but his arguments are harder to refute. Hampshire, formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a professor at Princeton and Stanford universities, is one of the leading lights of 20th-century philosophy. In Justice Is Conflict, he argues that because conflict presumes openness, diversity, and the questioning of final authority, it can be a safeguard against many kinds of tyranny. When we seek to eliminate conflict, in Hampshire's view, we are acting as heirs to the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition that sets up reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Hampshire wants us to shrug off the claustrophobic blanket of this tradition and embrace Hume's dictum that "reason both is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions."
Hampshire is pointing us toward a new understanding of justice when he hearkens back to what he sees as Heraclitus's picture that "our political enmities in the city or state will never come to an end while we have diverse life stories and diverse imaginations." What's important for Hampshire is not the elimination of conflict, but rather its preservation, moderated by fair procedures. But can procedure ever truly be fair to its participants? In the final two chapters--"Against Monotheism" and "Conflict and Conflict Resolution"--Hampshire turns his attention to procedural justice in modern society. Here he meditates on some of the main threats to and allies of fair procedure. Hampshire's crisp prose and penchant for succinctness render this slim book accessible to a wide audience. Still, there is plenty of philosophical muscle for an academic reader. --Eric de Place
This book, which inaugurates the Princeton Monographs in Philosophy series, starts from Plato's analogy in the Republic between conflict in the soul and conflict in the city. Plato's solution required reason to impose agreement and harmony on the warring passions, and this search for harmony and agreement constitutes the main tradition in political philosophy up to and including contemporary liberal theory. Hampshire undermines this tradition by developing a distinction between justice in procedures, which demands that both sides in a conflict should be heard, and justice in matters of substance, which will always be disputed. Rationality in private thinking consists in adversary reasoning, and so it does in public affairs. Moral conflict is eternal, and institutionalized argument is its only universally acceptable restraint and the only alternative to tyranny.In the chapter "Against Monotheism," Hampshire argues that monotheistic beliefs are only with difficulty made compatible with pluralism in ethics. In "Conflict and Conflict Resolution," he argues that socialism, seen as the proposal of extended political solutions for natural human ills, is still a relevant, yet strongly contested, ideal.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Incredible Insight-Transformational observations
The title is slightly misleading-it is ideas that are always in conflict. The measure of Justice is how those conflicts are dealt with. The transformational concept presented by Hampshire is that which side of the argument prevails is not nearly as important as the system used to determine which side prevails. He observes that there are always arguments to be made on each side of a difference of opinion whether it be pro or anti abortion or pro or anti assisted suicide or pro or anti welfare state ... Read More
Rating: - The foundations of our justice
Like the superb book "A Darwinian Left" by Peter Singer, this is a marvelous discourse on one of the fundamental principles of our society -- for anyone who wonders about the meaning of life, both are fascinating excursions into the realm of new thought.
This book is founded on an image out of the Middle Ages -- when two men, wrapped from head to toe in gleaming steel, carrying wicked lances, mounted on massive horses, charged full speed at each other to settle disputes about truth and justice ... Read More
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