Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick presents Anthony de Jasay's writings on liberalism from 2008 to 2012, continuing his Political Philosophy, Clearly and serving as a companion to Economic Sense and Nonsense. The present volume focuses on "the careless use, the misuse, and even the downright abuse of the language." Jasay considers this a vital defect of modern mainstream political thought, which "from Bentham and J. S. Mill to the present is thickly polluted by intellectual fraud." He says that this fraud is in fact unconscious, self-deception being the means of avoiding bad faith. Jasay stresses the difficulty of keeping matters of truth and falsity free of matters of belief, for belief is often based on wishful thinking. Linguistic tricks are therefore a central concern of this book. The concepts of "rights," "justice," "equality" "social contracts," and so forth are used equivocally, so that subtle shifts of meaning of such terms may remain unnoticed, even unsuspected, by user and audience alike. Jasay maintains that social justice is among the terms most widely misused: reaching beyond ordinary justice and its rules, it lacks rules of its own and is empty of content until linguistic usage supplies the need. "Social injustice is automatically identified with some inequality, social justice with some equality." Further, "'just' being self-evidently superior to "unjust', ... dressing up equality in the robes of social justice invests it with irresistible moral authority," an authority Jasay considers spurious. Yet, he points out, dubious theories that appeal to emotion rather than to reason find wide acceptance, leading imperceptibly but inevitably to less rather than more justice of whatever kind. Book jacket.