Social Democracy and Social Justice

Abstract

Much discussion of social democracy and social justice is confused by a failure to clarify terms and traditions. A scan of Swedish, German, British and Australian reformist ideologies helps to establish the correlations between these traditions and their corresponding conceptions of social justice. In its most muscular forms, the project of social democracy has a broad horizon, because it ascribes a primary value to citizenship, a position from which the Anglophone tradition can learn in its own pursuit of social justice. Social justice itself ought be recognised as a far more obvious core value for radicals, though it remains strategically significant in the Australian context today.