Redressing Historical Injustice

This study co-authored by Wanjiru Njoya and David Gordon offers a closely reasoned argument against racial preferences and racial reparations. The authors offer a concept of justice that flatly contradicts these claims and which stresses self-ownership and individual responsibility. They correctly point out that the hardships that the ancestors of those now demanding special treatment may have been subject to in the past does not entitle them to special treatment at the expense of other Americans.

- Paul Gottfried, Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Elizabethtown College and Editor of Chronicles.

We can have individual liberty and property rights. Or we can have reparations. But we can’t have both. This is the compelling message from Wanjiru Njoya and David Gordon, who skillfully skewer the idea of compensation between racial groups for “historical injustice”. Do some groups of individuals owe other groups of individuals for circumstances that tookplace before any of them were born? Njoya and Gordon explain why the answer is ‘no’.

- Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law, Queen’s University and Executive Director, Rights Probe

This book offers an alternative to theories of distributive or restorative justice in resolving economic inequality, highlighting the importance of property rights and market participation in advancing liberty, prosperity and the rule of law. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of economics, law, politics and philosophy.

David Gordon is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review. Dr. Gordon is the author of Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Exploitation, Freedom, and Justice, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, and Critics of Marx.

Wanjiru Njoya is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is a law graduate of the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and a former Rhodes Scholar (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, 1998). Dr. Njoya is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice: The Classical Ideal of Equality in Contexts of Racial Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).