Justice Is Conflict.

Justice is not harmony, but conflict, Stuart Hampshire tells us. No doubt, many readers will find his position hard to swallow, but his arguments are harder to refute. Hampshire, formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a professor at Princeton and Stanford universities, is one of the leading lights of 20th-century philosophy. In Justice Is Conflict, he argues that because conflict presumes openness, diversity, and the questioning of final authority, it can be a safeguard against many kinds of tyranny. When we seek to eliminate conflict, in Hampshire's view, we are acting as heirs to the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition that sets up reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Hampshire wants us to shrug off the claustrophobic blanket of this tradition and embrace Hume's dictum that "reason both is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions."

Hampshire is pointing us toward a new understanding of justice when he hearkens back to what he sees as Heraclitus's picture that "our political enmities in the city or state will never come to an end while we have diverse life stories and diverse imaginations." What's important for Hampshire is not the elimination of conflict, but rather its preservation, moderated by fair procedures. But can procedure ever truly be fair to its participants? In the final two chapters--"Against Monotheism" and "Conflict and Conflict Resolution"--Hampshire turns his attention to procedural justice in modern society. Here he meditates on some of the main threats to and allies of fair procedure. Hampshire's crisp prose and penchant for succinctness render this slim book accessible to a wide audience. Still, there is plenty of philosophical muscle for an academic reader. --Eric de Place