The idea of distributive justice in seventeenth-century moral and political philosophy.

How to divide things fairly? Philosophers have been pondering this question under the heading of ‘distributive justice’ at least since Aristotle. It has recently been argued that the meaning of this term changed dramatically in the last 200 years.Today, distributive justice deals primarily with the fair division of benefits and burdens arising from social cooperation. It gives citizens a right to material goods based on need or effort. Yet before, say, 1790, scholars claim, distributive justice was not concerned with property arrangements. It allocated goods according to worthiness, and did not entail rights. How exactly modern distributive justice differs from earlier accounts is disputed. Older conceptions were probably more diverse than is currently recognized. This project fills a significant gap in the literature by analysing 17th–century ideas of distributive justice. To this end, I will examine what some of the main political philosophers of the period wrote about it – Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), John Locke (1632-1704) and G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) – as well as English radicals like Gerard Winstanley (1609-1676). The project has an innovative angle: it analyses distributive justice in light of changing conceptions of justice as such (of which distributive justice is but a part). My hypothesis is that new ways of thinking about the notion arose in the 17th-century due to renewed reflection on rights and merit.