The problem of justice and power in the contemporary political liberalism

In political philosophy, some important disagreements about the concept of justice have been manifested since the very beginning of Socratic tradition and most of the time this problematic has been related with the power-justice relation since the dialogues of Platon. With the development of social life, particularly with the emergence of a wealthy class of "bourgeois" as a result of commercial and industrial flourishing and beginning to be effective in political area, new offers of solution have been suggested for the problem of power and justice. These offers have weakened the theocratic and feudal political structure in Western society. The first systematic philosophical movement which demanded a secular change was introduced by John Locke in the seventeenth century and this movement increasingly gained acceptance. With the rise of socio-political development other ideologies were added to this movement which was referred as "liberalism", therefore the problem which aroused varying solution offers has become much more complicated than its Socratic form. As opposed to the initial success of it liberalism started to regress especially against socialist ideology; however since the midtwentieth century it began to rise again. In this study, it is not only indicated that liberalism has different aspects since its beginning, but also shown that after the mid-twentieth century in which other ideologies lost their power, the differences in the sense of justice in liberalism generally increased from the opposite way to each other. While doing this, the differentiations in liberalism both in the first and second period were studied with a critical approach on the ideas of the most influential philosophers. For the first period John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Frédéric Bastiat, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, and for the second period Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Friedrich August von Hayek, Karl Raimund Popper, John Rawls and Robert Nozick are scrutinized in this respect. As an essential part of this thesis it has been defended that power and justice problem should be solved immediately and thus some solutions have been offered. One of this solutions, even if the intellectuals adhere to their ideological preferences, they need to give priority to the views that everyone will easily accept; and another is, it would be a mistake to overlook some religious opinions due to secular sensitivity, and there could be some solutions even in the religious politics which can be accepted in the secular perspective. For this reason, some suggestions which have Islamic roots are introduced as well.