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
Envoi
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
The several suggestions here – they are, and can be no more than that – in view of trying to assist, however modestly and imperfectly, in the ongoing renewal of several current ideas of social justice today have turned on an unusual notion of “mutuality” as sometimes being quite basically other than mere reciprocity.
These suggestions, that is, derive from the compelling notion of a one-sided movement towards utterly impoverished street children, towards persons who are incapable of any reciprocity whatsoever, a movement of the mind and heart and hand that comes into expression and that finds its proper completion only in salutary action.
It may sometimes do so thanks to a movement of mutuality in the central sense of a metaphorical kind of “mutual inductance.” This is the “mutuality,” I have argued here, that most often, although certainly not exclusively, may come about between completely destitute street children and those who, in multiple “moments,” turn to notice them not just theoretically but practically. And it is these “moments of mutuality” that may lead to the constitution of not just durably effective social action, but also even to the establishment of efficacious and sustainable political will.
Whatever those eventual outcomes might come to look like, once a perhaps more thoughtful, less metaphysically exclusive, and eminently efficacious account of a renewed idea of social justice might be more critically in hand, there is at least one thing that virtually all persons, however deeply skeptical, in the affluent and resourceful societies of the EU today can know.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Moments of MutualityRearticulating Social Justice in France and the EU, pp. 155 - 156Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2012