Social Justice, Human Rights and Public Policy ‐ by McLachlan, H.V

McLachlan, H.V. Social Justice, Human Rights and Public Policy , 2005 . Glasgow : Humming Earth 200pp £14.95 ISBN 1-84622-003-3 (pbk) Hugh McLachlan begins his book: ‘This book is a response to and a discussion of Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal, which is the report of The (Labour Party Inspired) Commission on Social Justice . . .’ (p. 9) The Centre for Social Justice at Coventry University, where I am a Research Fellow, was also created in response to the Borrie Commission on Social Justice, whose report appeared in 1994. So it is therefore somewhat appropriate for me to review McLachlan's book. He states quite clearly that its aim is: ‘. . . to show that and to show why the Report is inadequate and unreliable. It is a good focus for and a good starting point for a debate about but not an acceptable blueprint for the formulation and implementation of public policy’. (p. 10) So far, so good(ish). I would agree with McLachlan that the Borrie Commission report was inadequate. However, the question of its reliability probably relates more to the social democratic framework within which it is conceived more than to the report itself. McLachlan takes the Commission's report as his starting-point and uses it to advance some very wide-ranging philosophical arguments about the nature of the relationship between social justice, human rights and public policy. It becomes clear very early in the book, though, that his approach is somewhat idiosyncratic, to say the least. His first chapter, after a brief introduction which outlines what the book is going to be about, rails against postmodernism without any explanation of why he has chosen to do this. It is unnecessarily defensive and intellectually illogical to begin a book with a chapter which attacks a position without explaining why. The only, very short, explanation that he offers is that his criticism of the report might be seen to be of its universalist claims and that post-modernists would criticise it in this way and that therefore he might be perceived as a post-modernist! McLachlan shows himself to be a maverick academic and this I would applaud. I personally embrace this and welcome the opportunity to review a book from a fellow maverick academic! Having said this, however, I am very disappointed with the book. It comprises long lists of fairly obscure and eccentric examples with some political and social theory and philosophy inserted in-between and with a smattering of largely rhetorical questions throughout! Consider the following opening sentences of a chapter on poverty: ‘John Wisdom was an extremely good philosopher. The reason he is not so well known as his predecessor at Cambridge – Wittgenstein – is, I suspect, partly that Wisdom's philosophy is less spectacularly false, it is nearer to being correct than the other's brilliant and superficially plausible writing . . . Incidentally, Wittgenstein is my favourite philosopher and, taking all types of writers and writing, including fiction as well as non-fiction, into account, one of my favourite writers. What a strange activity philosophy is’. (p. 150) The book abounds with this type of commentary. He does make some reasonably good philosophical points, for example, about the differences between ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’. Also, he does have something valuable to say about the ideas of rights, justice etc. not being natural. However, any good arguments that McLachlan has, and I suspect he has many, are lost in clouds of rhetorical and obscure story-telling. But my biggest single criticism of McLachlan's book is his complete contradiction on a very fundamental point. In his chapter on ‘Postmodernism and social policy’, he criticises the relativism of the post-modernists as: ‘. . . the theory that the truth and falsity of statements is relative to the social context of their promulgation’. (p. 21) In his concluding chapter, in an opening section headed ‘Alledpendsism’, he writes: ‘I think that a correct answer to many philosophical and other abstract and other questions is: it all depends’. (p. 167) This is the clearest, most succinct statement of relativism that I have ever read! What is missing from McLachlan's book is any conception of the normative. While there are numerous references to such subjects as Sean Connery's height and good looks, Buddy Holly's death in a plane crash and Woody Allen's comments on restaurant critics, there is nothing at all on capitalism, social democracy or globalisation! The book is both confused and confusing

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