Introduction: The Quest for Universality in Contemporary Context

Abstract

�� ��� In this series, scholars address questions about the universality of justice with an eye to their salience within a diverse world.* The question is challenging because a deep tension lies at the center of debate over universal approaches to justice. Questions about the universality of justice, of course, have deep historical roots but also present themselves today within a distinctive political context. In Sophocles’ Antigone (written in or before 441 B.C.E.), Creon, the King of Thebes, decrees that no one shall bury the corpse of Polynices, who betrayed Thebes in civil war. Antigone buries Polynices in defiance of the order, viewing it as a sibling’s sacred duty. Against the charge that she has committed a grave crime, Antigone proclaims her action justified by dictates of justice higher than the King’s law. Creon rejects Antigone’s appeal to a standard of justice independent of the city’s law, insisting that the law of Thebes is simply what he commands. In Plato’s Republic , written roughly eighty years later, Thrasymachus insists that laws are nothing but tools that the strong use to impose their will on the weak. 1 Rulers drape laws with the exalted name of justice simply to induce compliance. The meaning of justice, then, turns on the happenstance of which party prevails in the struggle for dominance. In opposition to Thrasymachus, Socrates envisions a properly ordered society rooted in an ideal of justice. For Socrates, justice is an eternal standard, transcending the will of any ruler. Universality was a topic of debate in ancient Greece and it has been a persistent topic of debate across widely varying historical and cultural contexts. The study of American constitutionalism, for example, finds intellectual roots in Cicero and Roman Stoicism, Aquinas and medieval Scholasticism, the early British jurists Fortescue and Coke, and modern social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke. 2 To engage the universality of justice is