title: Social Justice after the 20th Century. Edited by Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman
Creators: name: Conway, Martin
name: Erlichman, Camilo
name: Kott, Sandrine
name: De Haan, Ido
name: Grama, Adrian
name: Römer, Felix
Publisher: name: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Social justice
subject: inequality
subject: welfare state
subject: neoliberalism
subject: democracy
subject: history of the present
subject: 940 Geschichte Europas

description: The history of present-day Europe is often written as a story of decline. For many, it is the collapse of the certitudes of the post-war era that most obviously characterizes the European societies of the present. The erosion of mass political parties, the electoral triumph of new populist movements, the return of armed conflict to the continent and above all the extent to which politics has simply ceased to be predictable are trends which have encouraged historians to contrast the stability of the post-war era with the fragility and volatility of the present. Present-day Europe, to draw on the influential phraseology used by Carl Schorske about the 1890s, has entered a distinctively new key, and its internal logics no longer seem to follow the norms of the 20th century. The perceived resurgence in social inequality is central to this understanding of the recent history of Europe. Since the economic shocks of the 1970s, the associated increase in unemployment in western European societies and the capitalist transformation of the states of east-central Europe after 1989/90, the history of recent decades appears to have been dominated by a retreat of the ambition to achieve socially just societies, leading to a continuous exacerbation of material inequality. Consequently, contemporary historians have in recent years spent much ink exploring the ways in which market-fundamentalist ideas have reconfigured European societies since the late 1970s. The 1990s play an important role in these narratives, as the moment when the welfare states that had been built incrementally in Europe over previous decades came under serious attack and were partly dismantled by governments seeking to curb spending. In this interpretation, the story of social justice since the collapse of state socialism in 1989/90 can be told in a rather straightforward manner as one of decay in the face of a neoliberal onslaught. There is much to commend an approach that emphasizes how the last decades of the 20th century disrupted the centrality of social justice in the history of European societies. The purpose of our recent collective book Social Justice in 20th-Century Europe was to show how different versions of social justice had developed across the century, demonstrating the extent to which very different political groups and regimes had competed for ownership of the meaning of social justice. As we argued in that book, there was much plurality and change; but at the same time, these divergent conceptions of social justice were rooted in the more durable confessional and ideological worlds of Europe. Above all, during the 20th century, social justice became a central source of political legitimacy that those in power ignored at their peril.