Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Orientations
- Part I Poor Health: Social Justice and Mutual Recognition
- Part II Poor Housing: Social Justice and Mutual Understanding
- Part III Poor Food: Social Justice and Mutual Respect
- Part IV Poor Spirits: Social Justice and Articulacy
- Chapter Seven Unschooled Children
- Concluding Remarks
- Chapter Eight Discourse and Social Justice
- Concluding Remarks: Mutualizing Articulacy
- Re-Orientations
- Concluding Remarks
- Envoi
- Endnotes
Concluding Remarks: Mutualizing Articulacy
from Part IV - Poor Spirits: Social Justice and Articulacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Orientations
- Part I Poor Health: Social Justice and Mutual Recognition
- Part II Poor Housing: Social Justice and Mutual Understanding
- Part III Poor Food: Social Justice and Mutual Respect
- Part IV Poor Spirits: Social Justice and Articulacy
- Chapter Seven Unschooled Children
- Concluding Remarks
- Chapter Eight Discourse and Social Justice
- Concluding Remarks: Mutualizing Articulacy
- Re-Orientations
- Concluding Remarks
- Envoi
- Endnotes
Summary
When we look back on at least these presentations of several of the major themes in Habermas’s richly varied refl ections on society on moral discourse with respect to the radically ignorant status of almost all destitute Paris street children, we can perhaps see a still further and for now final basic notion that the idea of social justice today needs to include. For unless social justice is to be understood as necessarily incorporating the notion of proper linguistic articulation of several of the most basic values of the person, then neither mutualizing recognition nor mutualizing understanding nor mutualizing respect can actually come about. Evidently, without words to say what matters, without mutualizing consideration for proper language usage, no eff ective social interactions are possible.
If some unschooled Paris street children are understood, however destitute, as nonetheless persons necessarily embodying a public sovereign good, the capacity for exhibiting certain basic minimum capabilities, and the self-respect that a society’s rule of law actually protects, they must be understood as embodying also a profound need for verbally articulating, however partially their precarious and at times mortal situations. More simply, a further essential that destitute Paris street children lack as persons, then, is sufficient power verbally to express themselves not adequately.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Moments of MutualityRearticulating Social Justice in France and the EU, pp. 145 - 146Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2012