Justice is one of the most fundamental concepts both in abstract discussions of political theory and in political practice. Most contemporary approaches to the idea of justice take as their point of departure relatively recent elaborations of justice, such as John Rawls’ theory of justice or Robert Nozick’s libertarian answer to Rawls. But there is a rich history of thinking about justice that goes back at least to classical antiquity, and this deep history of justice provides a kind of hidden background to more recent theories such as those of Rawls or Nozick.
Other basic political ideas, such as the concepts of democracy, of liberty, or of popular sovereignty, have received more historical scrutiny in more or less recent times. Scholars including Valentina Arena, Jochen Bleicken, Annelien de Dijn, George Grote, James Hankins, Mogens Herman Hansen, Daniel Lee, Wilfried Nippel, Josiah Ober, Martin Ostwald, Kurt Raaflaub, Paul Rahe, Jennifer T. Roberts, Melissa Schwartzberg, Quentin Skinner, Chaim Wirszubski and many others have all contributed to elucidate the rich historical background of ideas about democracy or liberty. Justice, however, is arguably even more fundamental a concept than either of those and seems to trump other values once the requirements of justice are seen to conflict with them.
Our inquiry will thus be relevant to normative political theory, but it also has the potential to shed light on issues of interest to the social sciences. This is so because ideas about justice have historically played a fundamental role in the design and justification of legal orders, while a large proportion of mainstream social science takes legal order simply for granted. A lot of economics, for example, presupposes the existence of stable political and legal order with governments that define property rights and enforce laws in a predictable manner.
The long-term historical investigation of ideas about justice we envisage has therefore the potential to shed light on what much of social science, focused on the hitherto politically stable societies of the post-war West, has been taking as an exogenous given: the conditions that make a just political and legal order possible in the first place. The Roman concept of justice that is the focus of our project is particularly suitable in this regard given the centrality it accords to law and legal order.
