Social Justice and the American Essay

This chapter begins with the origins of "social justice," a term that emerged among Jesuits in the 1840s and ’50s and then infused the Catholic workers’ movements and social teaching of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American essayists and activists have used the essay to persuade readers of the productive overlap of two utopian systems: Christianity and (democratic) socialism. This chapter explores five thinkers – Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Cornel West – who have been particularly prolific essayists, writing fluently and frequently about social justice in the earliest sense of the word. By recalling the earliest context of the term social justice, this chapter adds another dimension to contemporary debates on everything from Black struggle to economic inequality, from climate justice to equitable representation at all levels of government. The essay form allowed the writers studied in this chapter to articulate in a variety of styles, from the lyrical to the vociferous, the pedagogical to the morally urgent, the need for a compassionate understanding of human wretchedness in an industrialized world bent on breaking the worker.