When labeling unfortunate results as social injustices leads to an attack upon the free society, with the aim of moving it toward a command society, Hayek strenuously opposes the term. The historical records of the command economies of Nazism and communism justify his revulsion at that way of thinking. Hayek recognized that at the end of the nineteenth century, when the term social justice came to prominence, it was first used as an appeal to the ruling classes to attend to the needs of the new masses of uprooted peasants who had become urban workers. To this he had no objection. What he did object to was careless thinking.
Careless thinkers forget that justice is by definition social.
Such carelessness becomes positively destructive when the term social no longer describes the product of the virtuous actions of many individuals, but rather the utopian goal toward which all institutions and all individuals are made in the utmost degree to converge by coercion. In that case, the social in social justice refers to something that emerges not organically and spontaneously from the rule abiding behavior of free individuals, but rather from an abstract ideal imposed from above. Given the strength of Hayek s argument against the term, it may seem odd to assert that he himself was a practitioner of social justice even if one adds, as one must, social justice rightly understood. Still, Hayek plainly saw in his vocation as a thinker a life of service to his fellow men. Helping others to understand the intellectual keys to a free and creative society is to render them a great benefit.