The Economics of Justice

By Josef Solterer Georgetown University I Some 50 years ago, Father Thomas F. Divine, S.J. assembled at Marquette University and other meeting places a group of men and women for the purpose of studying justice in matters economic. They were mostly economics teachers in American Catholic colleges, dissatisfied with available textbooks and the prevailing trend of economic theory which neglected completely any connection between economics and ethics. The Divine group, later to become the Catholic Economic Association, now the Association for Social Economics, set out to remedy this deficiency. It made the study of justice in economics the formal object of its endeavors. The scientific imagination of the group concerning justice was fired not only by the then widely discussed papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragessimo Anno but also by the appearance of new social economic institutions: the Welfare State in Britain and the New