Justice vs Power Relation - Essay Example

Justice in some of the other circumstances is related to power. For instance, if a rich man has done something wrong to the poor man, ultimately the justice will be given to the rich man. This is because of the power of his richness. But this does not necessarily happen always. The fundamental concepts of justice and power provide points of departure for leading scholars to explore the various domains of sociological research. As they note the explicitness of the engagement with issues of power and the relative silence about or indirectness in taking on questions of justice found in most law and society research. While avoiding the discussion that directly addresses justice, most laws and society researchers have no such qualms about the concept of power. the study of power is relatively easy to frame as legitimate social science, while the study of justice seems normative.

Hobbes defined power as the ability to secure well-being or personal advantage 'to obtain some future apparent Good'. He saw people as having 'Natural Power' that comes from internal qualities such as intellectual eloquence, physical strength, and prudence. Leviathan (1651) was Hobbes's masterpiece. Man is not naturally good, Hobbes claimed, but naturally a selfish Hedonist. One of the interesting elements of Hobbes's story is that concepts like liberty, justice, property, etc. have no natural, intrinsic meaning. They are pure social constructions. They are generated and imposed by the Leviathan, through his laws and institutions, to keep war and social disorder at bay. As history has shown, no set of values will last forever but will evolve as circumstances change. Hobbes is particularly keen to note that law itself is completely dependent on power. A law without a credible and powerful authority behind it is just simply not a law in any meaningful sense. Hobbes is thus one of the progenitors of "legal positivism", i.e. that justice is whatever the law says it is. An "unjust law" is simply an oxymoron.

Like other Western philosophers, Machiavelli was influenced by the early Greek philosophers, especially Plato. However, in many cases, Machiavelli seems to be arguing against Platonic philosophy. Machiavelli believed in "Virtue'", whatever was best for the State was Virtue'. Machiavelli believes the state exists to make war, and a good ruler exists for only one purpose to make war, this is his only concern. For Machiavelli justice does not exist either in nature or by god’s commandment. His thoughts on the rules of power encompass the struggles for every level of power, from the proletariat struggling in the corporate world to strategies performed by the world leader in the sixteenth century to now. Adolph A. Berle wrote that The Prince is "the greatest single study of power on record".