The Other Kind of Utopia, Or How Social Justice Is Possible in the World of Those Loving One’s Non-Neighbor

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum is a famous American philosopher and an incredibly prolific author who published more than twenty books and five hundred articles on a wide range of issues of “good living” — from the fragility of goodness and poetic justice, love of country and cultivating humanity to the intelligence of emotions and the new religious intolerance (and this is not an exhaustive list). Unfortunately, only two books have been translated into Russian — Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2014) and Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2023). The first book is thematically focused and aims at proving both the flawed interpretation of education as an exclusively tool for economic growth and the value of the humanities and arts for the high quality of life and prosperity of democratic states. The second book also emphasizes the importance of education and the arts, compassionate citizenship and the pursuit of the common good, is based on personal observations of life in the United States and India, promotes the ideas of social justice and equality, but on a higher level of generalizations, relying on the author’s previous research and adding the most important emotional “ingredient” of social order — love. The article is an attempt to show the undoubted strengths of this great book (rich in research, concepts and illustrations) and its (more doubtful) limitations which are due primarily to the book’s implicit expectation of the reader’s awareness of its conceptual foundations (previous works of Nussbaum), and the past decade’s peculiar effect on its ideological, conceptual and illustrative content.