Justice as a Pillar of Nationalism

The article is devoted to the analysis of the significance of the concept of justice for the construction of nationalism as one of the fundamental practices of a developed industrial society. Using the example of social thought in Ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the New Age, it is demonstrated that reflections on the content of the concept of justice and the desire for the practical implementation of this concept have accompanied humanity throughout its history. However, it was in the New Age, within the framework of the formation of industrial society, that the concept of justice acquired special significance, becoming the foundation that ensures the connection and balance of the values of liberal ideology (based on the idea and free individual) and nationalism (postulating the values of collectivism), which became the basis of the modern democratic social order. The pinnacle of the development of modern industrial society, based on the combination of liberalism and nationalism, was the welfare state. However, since the 1980s, there has been a process of gradual rejection of the welfare state (which is beginning to be seen as excessively expensive and hindering the implementation of individual rights), which is a visible sign of the erosion of the modern social order, caused by the imbalance between liberalism (which has taken the form of neoliberalism) and nationalism. Such a loss leads to an as yet unconscious, but nonetheless important, atomization of societies, their disintegration into a conglomerate of parts of different compositions.