The Concept of Social Justice Has No Meaning

More recently, I have encountered similar difficulties with the blessed word 'social.' Like 'planning' it is one of the fashionable good words of our time, and in its original meaning of belonging to society it could be a very useful word. But in its modern usage in such connections as 'social justice' (one would have thought that all justice is a social phenomenon!), or when our social duties are contrasted with mere moral duties, it has become one of the most confusing and harmful words of our time, not only itself empty of content and capable of being given any arbitrary content one likes, but depriving all terms with which it is combined . . . of any definite content. In consequence I felt obliged to take a position against the word 'social', and to demonstrate that in particular the concept of social justice had no meaning whatever, calling up a misleading mirage which clear-thinking people ought to avoid. But this attack on one of the sacred idols of our time again made many people regard me as an irresponsible extremist, entirely out of sympathy with the spirit of our time.

--F.A. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, ed. Bruce Caldwell, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 40.