Rectifying Historical Injustice

Calls for redress of historical wrongs regularly make headlines around the world. People dispute the degree to which justice should be concerned with righting past wrongs, with some arguing that justice should be primarily focused on claims arising from present disadvantage. Proponents and sceptics of restitution, compensation, and other forms of historical redress have engaged with the thesis that historical injustice can be superseded, the idea that changing circumstances following historical injustices can alter what justice later requires. The “supersession thesis,” developed by legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, has been challenged, both conceptually and in terms of its possible application and implications. This is the first book to critically assess how the supersession thesis might be reconstructed, challenged, or applied to empirical cases, with an eye toward larger questions surrounding the temporal orientation of justice. Cases examined include Indigenous peoples, linguistic injustice, and climate change. The edited volume includes contributions by established and junior scholars from philosophy, law, American Indian Studies, and political science, who draw from Indigenous thought, settler colonial theory, liberalism, theories of historical entitlements, and structural injustice theories. It concludes with a reply by Jeremy Waldron. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Rectifying International Injustice examines the theory behind claims for reparations and compensation as a result of historic international injustice.

Argues that understanding the impact of past injustices faced by some peoples can help us understand and overcome injustice today.

Should contemporary citizens provide material redress to right past wrongs? There is a widespread belief that contemporary citizens should take responsibility for rectifying past wrongs. Nahshon Perez challenges this view, questioning attempts to aggregate dead wrongdoers with living people, and examining ideas of intergenerational collective responsibility with great suspicion. He distinguishes sharply between those who are indeed unjustly enriched by past wrongs, and those who are not. Looking at issues such as the distinction between compensation and restitution, counterfactuals and the non-identity problem, Perez concludes that individuals have the right to a clean slate, and that almost all of the pro-intergenerational redress arguments are unconvincing. Key Features *Unique in claiming past wrongs should not be rectified *Analyses pro-intergenerational material redress arguments *Case studies include court cases from Australia, Northern Cyprus, the United States and Austria, and political and social movements from the US, Palestine and Arab countries

DIVA collection of seminal essays that examines the arguments in favor of the redress movement in the United States./div

Develops a new account of historical injustice and redress, demonstrating why a consideration of history is crucial for gender equality.

This book examines how justice and reconciliation in world politics should be conceived in response to the injustice and alienation of modern colonialism?

More than ten years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the financial sector is thriving. But something is deeply wrong. Taxpayers bore the burden of bailing out “too big to fail” banks, but got nothing in return. Inequality has soared, and a populist backlash against elites has shaken the foundations of our political order. Meanwhile, financial capitalism seems more entrenched than ever. What is the left to do? Justice Is an Option uses those problems—and the framework of finance that created them—to reimagine historical justice. Robert Meister returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance. Instead of closing our eyes to the political and economic realities of our era, we need to grapple with them head-on. Meister does just that, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality. Meister here formulates nothing less than a democratic financial theory for the twenty-first century—one that is equally conversant in political philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Justice Is an Option is a radical, invigorating first page of a new—and sorely needed—leftist playbook.