ChaïM Perelman

Abstract

Abstract The most substantial and the most important of Chaïm Perelman’s writings on justice is a long essay,De la justice,first published in 1945. It is a powerful piece of work which has had a wide influence, and for these reasons it calls for critical examination even though Perelman himself might have thought that some aspects of it were superseded by his later publications. For example, the English translation that appeared in 1963 w1der the title ‘Concerning Justice’ includes a footnote implying that Perelman had modified his view that values are ‘logically arbitrary’. The footnote says that, since writing those remarks about values in the essay on justice, ‘the author has tried to present, through his theory of argumentation, a way of reasoning about values’, indicating that his later theory of argumentation (developed particularly in a book calledTraité de Pargumentation: La Nouvelle Rhétorique)qualifies the earlier bare statement that values are arbitrary. I shall take account of this in what I have to say. Even in the original form of the essay on justice there is a clear link with Perelman’s views on logic and rhetoric, for his distinction between formal and concrete justice illustrates the difference that he saw between the reasoning of formal logic and the kind of debate that goes on in the area of rhetoric. He uses the term ‘rhetoric’ in the wide sense given to it by Aristotle, meaning not just the devices of persuasive language but the general character of reasoning, other than that of formal logic, which is used to support a case.