Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice

Much recent political theory aims to move beyond the dominant approach to theorizing justice by foregrounding cases of injustice. Judith Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is regularly invoked in this context, yet the full force of her challenge to the “normal model of justice” and its implications for understanding injustice have not been fully appreciated. This article reconstructs and defends Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. It evaluates the differences between John Rawls’s account of the sense of justice and Shklar’s notion of the sense of injustice, showing why the latter should be theorized in relation to plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations, rather than in relation to ideal principles of justice. It illustrates how we can evaluate political responses to injustice without recourse to such principles and maintains that doing so is a strength of any democratic theory that is committed to giving injustice its due.