What do you think?
Rate this book
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
156 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1920
21 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Leacock
499 books102 followersStephen P. H. Butler Leacock, FRSC, was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humorist in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies. The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour was named in his honour.
Wikipedia article.
Wikipedia article.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 26, 2024
"After a century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as ever."
June 4, 2020
Picked this up after reading an Angry Bear post by trusted economic thinker: Sandwichman https://angrybearblog.com/2020/04/fro.... It hooked me in pretty quickly, " [T]he debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or is it poverty?... The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of organized labor are intermingled with the underground conspiracy of social revolution... To some minds the demand for law and order overwhelms all other thoughts.... To others the fierce desire for social justice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe... Society shaken to its base, hurls itself into the industrial suicide of the general strike, refusing to feed itself, denying its own wants."
I mean, it is pretty remarkably on the nose. While history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes, and so I have found it comforting reading how those with much less technology have managed when similar calamities fell upon them, Samuel Pepys's diary from the Great London Plague of 1665 to the Great London Fire of 1666 being an especially great example. What I feel that this little gem of political economic philosophy has to offer is threefold (making it befitting of 6 stars in my opinion):
1- Deference given to and patience in tearing down various ideas on which the author does not agree with or has not fully formed his conclusions. These ideas are still prevalent today, and are being tested in very much the same manner, but seeing as this was published a little ahead of 100 years ago, you can literally skip to the where will be in a few years with respect to much of the current debate on social justice (the old fashioned sense) and individualistic capitalism. Caveat, the weakest part of the book nowadays is how much time it spends dismantling some very old ideas held by proponents of socialism of yesteryear, you can skip those because no one believes in them now. Example from Chapter 1:
- "We do not owe our stake in this world to kings and queens", surely this is an inextricably American position, no? "Our common reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their leaders, and their names are forgotten."
"After a century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still conquers us"
-> "If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times better off. But it is not"
-> "countless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untired energies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production of necessary things to the making of mere comforts... The observer might well remain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he lives."
-> "And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also—or peace under the old conditions of industry—is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more than one adult worker in ten—so at least it might with confidence be estimated—is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace." (accompanied by WWI era statistics). "War is destruction" of all of this
2- The arguments really flow in a unique to today way. I love the structure which makes the aims and limitations of the argument clear up front, then follows with natural questions ad natural answers then natural questions and natural answers, surprisingly easy to read.
- "Adam Smith et followers, Beginning as controversialists anxious to overset a particular system of trade regulation, they ended by becoming the exponents of a new social order. Modified and amended as their system is in its practical application, it still[39] largely conditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we must turn"
-> "... assumed the existence of the state and of contract. It took for granted the existence of individual property, in consumption goods, in capital goods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. The last assumption was not perhaps without misgivings:"
-> The essential problem of classicists is this question: "what would happen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control over machinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of "enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract and the right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the most cheering description. The result would be a progressive amelioration of society, increasing in proportion to the completeness with which the fundamental principles involved were allowed to act, and tending ultimately towards something like a social millennium or perfection of human society.
-> And so, like other costs of production "Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply of labor represented by the[45] existing and increasing working class. Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what was coming to him.""
-> But there was one peculiar case. "Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the classical economist..."
-> This myopia resulted in full embrace of "the principle of laissez-faire. The doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing this the economist could wash his hands of the poor,"
-> But remember, with "all its shortcomings it served a magnificent purpose: It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery towards social freedom, from the mediæval autocratic régime of fixed caste and hereditary status towards a régime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf.
3- Most notably, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Leacock is an NYU professor who fully was bit by the flowery prose bug that was injecting all NYC professional writers at the time. Honestly, much of the settings and images seem taken out of Shakespeare, until you remember this is supposed to be dry economics at points. Reminds me a lot of Justice Benjamin Cardozo in the way he interweaves the poetry with well ordered and compelling substantive arguments. If you are one who does not care for such frivolity in such important sociopolitical matters, you can leave, no one invited the fun police.
I mean, it is pretty remarkably on the nose. While history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes, and so I have found it comforting reading how those with much less technology have managed when similar calamities fell upon them, Samuel Pepys's diary from the Great London Plague of 1665 to the Great London Fire of 1666 being an especially great example. What I feel that this little gem of political economic philosophy has to offer is threefold (making it befitting of 6 stars in my opinion):
1- Deference given to and patience in tearing down various ideas on which the author does not agree with or has not fully formed his conclusions. These ideas are still prevalent today, and are being tested in very much the same manner, but seeing as this was published a little ahead of 100 years ago, you can literally skip to the where will be in a few years with respect to much of the current debate on social justice (the old fashioned sense) and individualistic capitalism. Caveat, the weakest part of the book nowadays is how much time it spends dismantling some very old ideas held by proponents of socialism of yesteryear, you can skip those because no one believes in them now. Example from Chapter 1:
- "We do not owe our stake in this world to kings and queens", surely this is an inextricably American position, no? "Our common reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their leaders, and their names are forgotten."
"After a century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still conquers us"
-> "If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times better off. But it is not"
-> "countless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untired energies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production of necessary things to the making of mere comforts... The observer might well remain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he lives."
-> "And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also—or peace under the old conditions of industry—is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more than one adult worker in ten—so at least it might with confidence be estimated—is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace." (accompanied by WWI era statistics). "War is destruction" of all of this
2- The arguments really flow in a unique to today way. I love the structure which makes the aims and limitations of the argument clear up front, then follows with natural questions ad natural answers then natural questions and natural answers, surprisingly easy to read.
- "Adam Smith et followers, Beginning as controversialists anxious to overset a particular system of trade regulation, they ended by becoming the exponents of a new social order. Modified and amended as their system is in its practical application, it still[39] largely conditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we must turn"
-> "... assumed the existence of the state and of contract. It took for granted the existence of individual property, in consumption goods, in capital goods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. The last assumption was not perhaps without misgivings:"
-> The essential problem of classicists is this question: "what would happen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control over machinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of "enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract and the right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the most cheering description. The result would be a progressive amelioration of society, increasing in proportion to the completeness with which the fundamental principles involved were allowed to act, and tending ultimately towards something like a social millennium or perfection of human society.
-> And so, like other costs of production "Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply of labor represented by the[45] existing and increasing working class. Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what was coming to him.""
-> But there was one peculiar case. "Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the classical economist..."
-> This myopia resulted in full embrace of "the principle of laissez-faire. The doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing this the economist could wash his hands of the poor,"
-> But remember, with "all its shortcomings it served a magnificent purpose: It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery towards social freedom, from the mediæval autocratic régime of fixed caste and hereditary status towards a régime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf.
3- Most notably, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Leacock is an NYU professor who fully was bit by the flowery prose bug that was injecting all NYC professional writers at the time. Honestly, much of the settings and images seem taken out of Shakespeare, until you remember this is supposed to be dry economics at points. Reminds me a lot of Justice Benjamin Cardozo in the way he interweaves the poetry with well ordered and compelling substantive arguments. If you are one who does not care for such frivolity in such important sociopolitical matters, you can leave, no one invited the fun police.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2024
A fantastic and sober look at why we humans can't seem to build that perfect society that we have always dream of.
Communism and socialism? No altruistic or uncorrupt leadership can be found to make it work.
Capitalism and democracy? Pretty good options for us all things considered.
Starvation despite great advancements in machines and production? We produce for man's wants not needs.
Lealock's work is simple yet expansive. He answers many questions still discussed today.
A great read!
Communism and socialism? No altruistic or uncorrupt leadership can be found to make it work.
Capitalism and democracy? Pretty good options for us all things considered.
Starvation despite great advancements in machines and production? We produce for man's wants not needs.
Lealock's work is simple yet expansive. He answers many questions still discussed today.
A great read!
February 4, 2013
Leacock's views and insights on social justice systems...
February 16, 2013
I thought this was a very interesting read, addressing the problems in both systems of socialism and capitalism.
January 6, 2021
I disagreed with a number of leacock’s conservative views. However I cannot deny that this book length essay was easy to read and well written.
Fear of socialism is his blindspot. His critiques of the left are less of a criticism and more propaganda about how socialism would bring about the destruction of western civilisation. When he critiques the system of the early 1900s however he offers some insightful commentary. His vision for a social democracy was also relatively appealing; a philosophy that mixes the best parts of a free market society with a socialist society.
As a left leaning person I felt quite uncomfortable at having many of my views challenged. Although in theory this is a good thing I can’t help the fact that it annoyed me, especially his lack of interest in treating left wing theories with the same level of respect that he placed on right wing theories.
During the middle of the book I was planning to give a 1 star, but Leacock redeemed himself at the end by outlining a relatively progressive vision for what the future could look like, including shorter work hours and a liveable minimum wage.
Fear of socialism is his blindspot. His critiques of the left are less of a criticism and more propaganda about how socialism would bring about the destruction of western civilisation. When he critiques the system of the early 1900s however he offers some insightful commentary. His vision for a social democracy was also relatively appealing; a philosophy that mixes the best parts of a free market society with a socialist society.
As a left leaning person I felt quite uncomfortable at having many of my views challenged. Although in theory this is a good thing I can’t help the fact that it annoyed me, especially his lack of interest in treating left wing theories with the same level of respect that he placed on right wing theories.
During the middle of the book I was planning to give a 1 star, but Leacock redeemed himself at the end by outlining a relatively progressive vision for what the future could look like, including shorter work hours and a liveable minimum wage.
September 18, 2025
A rather realistic look at why socialism probably wouldn't work, mostly based on opinion instead of providing direct evidence. I still agree with him, though you'll probably want to look elsewhere if you want actual convincing. There's quite a bit of disparagement towards "economists" around the start as well, it's rather generalized and overshadows the fact there are plenty who agree with him.
Despite his disagreement, he states plenty of reasoning to why he understands the desire for socialism, simply stating he just doesn't think the problems would be fixed by it. A worthy read if you want a reasonably minded individual willing to hear every side.
Despite his disagreement, he states plenty of reasoning to why he understands the desire for socialism, simply stating he just doesn't think the problems would be fixed by it. A worthy read if you want a reasonably minded individual willing to hear every side.
October 1, 2020
An essay arguing that socialism is doomed to fail because of human nature but that some of its concepts should be implemented as a kind of social welfare safety net. Surprisingly relevant for a 100 year old book.
February 16, 2022
Absolutely love this book, quite a difficult and wordy read (very much of its era) but the over all piece is brilliant, funny even!! I love the way it stands the test of time and still rings true that we will constantly be chasing our tail looking to build the best version of society we can.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews