While legal justice is more a function of formal provisions such as the Constitution, legislative acts and laws and judicial decisions and pronouncements than the actual political process. Justice in a political aspect relates to what relations the citizens bear with the political set-up, distribution of power and how the state power is organized. It suggests that political order must reflect representative character, allow political participation and political liberty, freedom of expression and universal suffrage. Political justice. as a guiding principle. must inform political order, political institutions and the political process. Primarily, liberal connotation of political justice is related to political equality, political rights and representative government. Equal political rights imply universal suffrage, equal right to hold public offices irrespective of backgrounds and social, religious or economic affiliations. A representative government is considered to provide limited or constitutional government. In both ways—by securing equal political rights and a limited government, the idea is to obtain checks on governmental power and keep the government subject to popular sovereignty. In liberal terms, political justice is closely related to people’s active sharing of power and its democratic form. Thus, liberal connotation of political justice would imply the following: (i) popularly elected government based on universal and equal suffrage, (ii) representative of the people exercising power of the state on behalf of the people, (iii) periodic transfer of power by peaceful and constitutional means, (iv) equal political rights and liberties to vote, hold public offices, form political associations and express political views and opposition to other’s political views.
A completely different meaning was associated to the term ‘political justice’ by William Godwin who is considered as the first modern anarchist. In his An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin opposed political authority and attacked private property. For him political justice connotes a principle, which aims the end of unfair economic condition (private property) and coercive intervention of the state.46
Liberal view maintains that political process seeks resolution of political conflict, distribution of resources and political offices through bargaining and reconciliation. Bernard Crick in his book In Defence of Politics (1962) attributed this nature of politics to Aristotle. He suggests that Aristotle treated politics as a mechanism of resolving group conflict in society. In such a situation, a political process must provide equal opportunity to competing groups for bargaining, representing its case and influencing decision-making. Political justice would suffer if the process becomes skewed and reflects the influence of the powerful. However, various studies in capitalist-liberal democratic societies have pointed out that generally the political process is dominated by élite. In the first half of the twentieth century, writers such as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca (the ruling class), Roberto Michels (Iron Law of Oligarchy), Ortega Gasset, Karl Mannheim, Joseph Schumpeter, Giovanni Sartori, C. Wright Mill (Power Elite), Robert Dahl (Polyarchy) and others demonstrated that the democratic process is not a guarantee of dispersal of power. They argued that ‘there has been and presumably will be small group of people which wields power in its hands disproportionate to its number.’47 If Abraham Lincoln’s vision of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ is a classical statement of political justice, then élite theorists amply demonstrated that this vision is neither being realized nor to be realized in future. The élite theory and Schumpeter, in particular, rejects the view that democracy ‘embodies distinctive ideals concerning participation in political life and the relationship between political leaders and the people’.48 We can infer that the idea of political participation and dispersal of power as elements of political justice has been overturned. Direct democracy or classical democracy is considered as participative mechanism but this has been replaced by representative democracy giving substantial power to representatives to decide about the people. Further transformation in the nature of power-sharing appears in the form of élite control. The fate of Lincoln’s vision and participative power sharing by the people need no further elaboration.
Radical democrats such as Crawford B. Macpherson, Tom B. Bottomore and others have critically evaluated the present status of democratic participation and power sharing by ‘equal citizens’ in the light of the transition of democracy from classical democracy (direct democracy) to representative democracy to elitist democracy. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (1977), Macpherson has discussed about ‘participatory democracy’ implying ‘substantial citizen participation in government decision making’.49 He seeks to present ways through which liberal-democratic government can be made more participatory. Keeping in view the size and operation of the capitalist system, Macpherson suggests that two prerequisites would have to be fulfilled for such a change. Firstly, he suggests that people’s consciousness (or unconsciousness) of seeing them as mere consumers should change and they should see and act as exerters and enjoyers of the exertion and development of their own capacities. Secondly, substantial reduction in social and economic inequality would be needed to ensure participatory democracy. This is because inequality requires a non-participatory party system to hold the society together. Bottomore in his Political Sociology (1979) discussed about the possibilities of democratic power sharing and its relationship with classes, social movements, parties and political action. He also stresses on the ‘need for more direct and immediate means of political action, which would allow the effective expression of particular grievances and interests, counter some of the consequences of centralization and bureaucratic administration and make possible a more continuous practical participation by a large number of citizens in determining the quality of their lives.’50
If political justice is about power sharing and determining decisions that affect the lives of the people, it should be participative, though not in the direct way but through what Macpherson calls ‘developmental power’ and what Bottomore calls ‘political action’. The idea that politics is a mechanism to reconcile interests in society cannot be meaningfully substantiated unless the parties whose interests are to be reconciled negotiate on equal, or near equal, terms. Political justice to be meaningfully realized requires reduction in social and economic inequality.
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