From the times of Plato to the present, much has been written about society and about justice, and about the various possible connections between the two. Various views, even opposing views, have been labelled as ‘social justice’ ideas.
In the twentieth century, a more precise definition of social justice movements is possible. The formative moment seems to have occurred among the members of two groups, the Freiburg Kreis and the Freiburg Schule. The two groups formed in the 1930s in order to oppose Hitler’s National Socialism.
The Freiburg Kreis was a group of anti-Nazi resistance thinkers who wanted to create a vision for how society would be rebuilt in postwar Germany. The Freiburg Schule was a group of anti-Nazi theoretical economists who wanted to lay the financial foundations for a postwar society which would embrace the ideas which the Nazis attacked.
Both groups sought social structures which would honor the value of each human life, protect individual freedom and personal political liberty, and would do so by restricting the government, honoring property rights, and allowing people the ability to make uninhibited economic decisions.
The ideas of the two Freiburg groups would find application largely in the policies of Ludwig Erhard, an academic economist who was a member of neither group but friendly with both. As Minister for Economic Affairs, he supervised the recovery of Germany after World War II.
Erhard was in contact with, and influenced by, a number of thinkers from the two groups, as Alfred Mierzejewski writes:
We can say the same thing about the influence of other members of the loose Freiburg school. Erhard was aware of the ideas of Franz Böhm, a lawyer who published an important book calling for the dismantling of cartels in 1933. He met Alfred Müller-Armack, an advocate of free markets supervised by the government early in the war. However, it is unlikely that Müller-Armack influenced him, at least at this stage. Müller-Armack was a Christian reformer, which Erhard was not, who saw the market as a tool that could be used to achieve goals shaped by Christian ideas of social justice.
When the war ended in May 1945, Germany was physically shattered: infrastructure of all types was almost completely lacking: telephones, roads, bridges, electrical power, sewage, water supply pipelines, etc. Food and clothing were scarce, and some people even died from starvation.
Beyond the material damage, of course, millions of German had died on battlefields, in cities subject to aerial bombardment, and in concentration camps. The survivors had been subjected to twelve years of Nazi economic terror: the meaning of the word ‘Nazi’ is ‘National Socialist.’
If any nation needed social justice, it was postwar Germany. Erhard and the thinkers of Freiburg understood how to create social justice, as Mierzejewski reports:
A freely functioning price system, a marketplace in which neither the government nor private interests set prices, alone made it possible for growth and social justice to be achieved.
The National Socialists had imposed governmental wage and price controls; Ludwig Erhard opposed them with the freedom of individuals and groups to negotiate prices and wages.
In the face of National Socialist high tax rates, Erhard cut taxes.
Where Hitler’s National Socialist had forced the state ownership of various industries and businesses, Erhard allowed for individuals to collectively and freely purchase stock and ownership of companies.
Erhard’s political allies were in two postwar political parties, the CDU and the FDP. In 1949, a document was written to express Erhard’s ideals, which had already begun to have a healing effect on the nation:
The program, which became famous as the Düsseldorf Principles, stated that the goal of CDU economic policy was a free people living in an order that promised a maximum of economic utility and social justice with safeguards for the weak.
While the phrase ‘social justice’ has been used over the centuries in a broad and general way, this phrase in its more precise and specific sense obtained its concrete meaning in the 1930s in Freiburg. This definitive meaning of ‘social justice’ lasted up through the 1960s, when Germany had largely recovered, and had shaken off the trauma which the National Socialists had inflicted upon it.
After the era of Ludwig Erhard, the phrase ‘social justice’ once again became diffuse. It continues to be used, but in a confused and ambiguous way, which robs it of a clear definition.
The Freiburger Schule, the Freiburger Kreis, and Ludwig Erhard constitute most crystalized and definite instance of social justice in both theory and application.