SOURCE: “Social Justice: The Hayekian Challenge,” in Critical Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 65-80.

In the following essay, Lukes examines Hayek's challenge to the idea that societies can and should be reshaped and made more just.

Over two decades ago Friedrich Hayek declared himself convinced that “social justice” is a mirage: an illusory goal whose pursuit, moreover, can only lead to disaster. The expression, he thought, described “the aspirations which were at the heart of socialism”; indeed, “the prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization” (Hayek 1976, 65, 66-67). “So long as the belief in ‘social justice’ governs political action,” he wrote, “this process must progressively approach nearer and nearer to a totalitarian system” (ibid., 68). The phrase, he declared, embodies a “quasi-religious belief”—“almost the new religion of our time”—but has “no content whatever,” and serves...