To say that social justice is a contested concept would be a significant understatement. Profound disagreement exists within and across a range of academic disciplines regarding the content and interrelation of its core principles, the appropriate scope of justice across space and time, and who bears institutional, collective, and individual responsibility for its implementation or violation. Much work is oriented towards clarifying these issues, whether by explicating and defending particular philosophical conceptions on matters of principle, scope, or responsibility, or by working through the prescriptive implications of a general idea of social justice as a demand for equity across a seemingly ever-expanding range of socioeconomic and political practices.

By contrast, the historical analysis offered in Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman’s volume embraces the unsettled philosophical and normative nature of its subject. Rather than “establishing a single definition” of social justice to guide their examination of its place in twentieth-century European politics, their contributors “explore the manifold complexities” of its uses in an impressive variety of cases (p. 6). The result is a series of often fascinating insights into how processes of appealing to social justice – whether to advance certain interests, frame social issues, or justify actions taken in its name – are shaped by the socioeconomic and political contexts in which they occur, while also affecting the development of those frameworks and, in part, defining the identities and relationships of the involved actors. The book presents important insights into social justice as “one of the main sites of political and social contestation across the continent” (p. 27), and thus as a core part of larger processes of political and socioeconomic change. Moreover, by underscoring the “innate malleability of social justice” (p. 29), and unmooring it from the “normative weight that often accompanies it”, the analysis reveals the dynamics of social justice in often-overlooked areas of political practice, including “places that we do not like” (p. 27), notably authoritarian states of different ideological persuasions.

The chapters cover significant ground and provide a detailed interpretation of “the contested meaning and multiple trajectories” (p. 267) of what are framed as “regimes of social justice” (p. 51). Without endeavouring to explain the emergence and evolution of regimes of social justice at a general level, the chapters instead examine how social justice “took shape within particular national histories of state development” (p. 20) and, as a result, came to mean “different things at different moments to different Europeans” (p. 28). The analysis is animated by a “shared belief among the contributors of the need for a more open-ended and plural history of social justice” (p. 10). A central conclusion is the importance of “particular place and community” in understanding “how notions of social justice were shaped” throughout twentieth-century Europe (p. 24). The volume’s spatial and temporal coverage is considerable. The chapters include analysis of the dynamics of social justice in the politics of progressive taxation in Belgium in the 1920s, fascist and authoritarian states in southern and central Europe, the evolution of immigration debates in western Europe since the 1960s, sexual justice, and several other richly contextualized analyses of practices of social justice.

Despite the explicit heterogeneity of the conceptual analysis and emphasis on the non-reductive diversity of social justice practices across the cases examined, some common themes emerge and lend the volume coherence. One concerns how social justice interacts with processes of political legitimacy and social control. Many chapters effectively navigate the terrain between two poles that often inform analyses of the politics of social justice. On the one hand are state-centric conceptions, which tie the emergence of social justice practices and narratives in the twentieth century to the rise of state capacity and the heightened role of ostensibly apolitical bureaucratic expertise, particularly in advancing the cause of “social improvement” as earlier modes of legitimation lost their resonance. The book challenges such “state-centric” approaches by embedding its analysis within the “shifting patterns and values of European societies” (p. 10). On the other hand, the contributors' analysis effectively highlights the agency of the state in defining the demands of social justice at particular times in relation to its other functions, and speaks more broadly to the state’s generative capacity in shaping the identities and interests of its subjects. The chapters are guided by the organizing principle that to “present social justice as simply demand-led would […] be misleading” (p. 14). While there are, of course, strong links between democratization, social movements, and the rise of social justice politics, the state and other public institutions are not portrayed as merely reflective of claims to justice advanced by their members.

Between these two poles, a nuanced and compelling account of the iterative nature of social justice politics emerges. A key idea is the role of evolving “legitimate expectations” as both inputs and outputs of policy and law enacted under the broad umbrella of social justice. As state capacity increased, citizens’ expectations of the state to deliver various cooperative benefits shifted, expanding the remit of state-led social justice into different sites of governance. The first significant development involved the evolution of general legitimation functions from the provision of “mere” peace and social order to the pursuit of social justice. Because of the open-ended and pluralistic nature of social justice, the state’s embrace of its identity as the chief provider of a just social order (justice’s emergence as the “sovereign virtue”, as it were) accelerated and diversified the expectations and claims advanced by citizens, resulting in a drastically expanded range of legitimation imperatives. Together, the chapters trace successive iterations of this process by examining shifting expectations grounded in a host of social movements and civil society groups. These include, to note just two examples, the transition from materialist, class-based social justice politics to claims rooted in culture, identity, and diversity-related modes of oppression. Another is the rise of post-national conceptions of social justice in which external and universal norms – such as human rights – come to shape dynamics of social justice within domestic politics.

Closely related to the sociological and normative interactions between social justice and the legitimation of political authority is its connection to citizenship. Here again, the chapters underscore the bidirectional dynamic of the “intricate interplay between rulers and ruled” (p. 28) in the political history of social justice. On the one hand, the language of citizenship is frequently invoked to advance claims of social justice against the state. Conversely, and perhaps more frequently, the presumed equality of citizenship is mobilized to expose the illegitimacy of different instances of injustice, suggesting the “aspirational” nature of social justice in twentieth-century social movements. On the other hand, European states frequently engaged in social reform and policymaking “to bring about social justice” in ways that both conditioned and embedded social citizenship in broader ideas of market efficiency. The discussion in Chapter Two of the rise of social insurance as embodying a “conception of social justice [that] was not to circumvent or restrict the market for labour but to improve its functioning” (p. 43) is a particularly salient example of the “dialectical” nature of the relationship between social justice and “changing conceptions of the market in Europe between 1870 and the end of the twentieth century” (p. 37).

In introducing the collection, the editors claim that the mode of twentieth-century social justice politics is historically unique, arguing that attitudinal and institutional change “serves to deepen the divide between the present and the twentieth century past” such that there is “something quite distinctive about the present-day debates” (p. 2). They attribute this development to the “pervasive loss of popular and national sovereignty [which] encourages more sectional and individualist attitudes in which the justice that can be imagined or campaigned for is anything but social” (pp. 3–4). This claim sits at odds with the conflictual and open-ended interpretive orientation of the concept of social justice endorsed and explored throughout the volume. As Samuel Moyn argues in the Postscript, the chapters show that social justice debates encompass competing views of the social order, including individualist ones (p. 271). This orientation enables the volume’s wide-ranging analysis of “process[es] of competition and multiplication that left no part of the political spectrum untouched” (p. 271). By the end of the twentieth century, social justice “had become a universal idiom for staging disagreement about what set of politics would bring about a desirable social order” (p. 272). The rich and diverse contributions in the volume suggest that, even as the issues and sites of political conflict evolve, claims and movements for social justice are likely to remain a key driver of political development, legitimation, and change in Europe and beyond.