Devine, Donald J. “Adam Smith and the Problem of Justice in Capitalist Society.” The Journal of Legal Studies 6, no. 2 (1977): 399–409.

Excerpt:

“ON the occasion of the bicentennial of the publication of the Wealth of

Nations we finally saw capitalism evaluated on the basis of Adam Smith’s
own conception of justice.’ Normally, capitalism has been analyzed with
external norms. This is not inappropriate as a final stage of evaluation but it
tends to be narrow if it is the only approach used. The present study will
carry the analysis further by distinguishing between different conceptions of
justice, by looking closely at Smith’s concept and by applying both his and
the normally used conceptions to the problem of justice in capitalist society.
The concept of justice comes to philosophy mainly from the Greeks, and it
is widely recognized that it has had a broader Greek meaning than the Latin
iustitia or the English concept of justice familiar to capitalism.2 Plato and
Aristotle, accordingly, used justice to mean either the general virtue of good-
ness or righteousness or in the broad sense of acting fairly.3 But in both
senses justice referred to a total way of acting in all personal, commercial,
social and political relationships which the individual maintained in the
community of the Greek city-state. Alexander the Great (or Eratosthenes
among philosophers), then, took essentially this same broad meaning of
justice and extended it to include relationships in the empire-state; and from
this root it has taken hold among modern nation-states-especially those
outside the British tradition.4”

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