While acknowledging that a perfect society will never be within reach and that people will always find reasons to treat each other badly, we should not discard the concept of “social justice,” much as it might have been ridiculed by Hayek and his followers.
I ridicule it. It is a nonsense phrase kept carefully vague in order to mask its own internal contradictions (now there's a Marxian critique!) and its only real application is its synonym, "theft." "Social justice" always, at least in modern application, involves expropriation of property in pursuit of some "higher law," that generally being class-based and entirely contrary to individual cases. It might be considered unjust, for example, to take a little girl's bicycle from her by force. If, however, you lump a group of kids into girls and boys, and find out that more of the girls have bicycles than do boys, then such an act of theft comes under the rubric of "social justice" no matter how unjust it is to the child involved. The lie begins in the grouping. That is the central falsehood of the collective.
For an excellent review of how the failed prediction of the impoverishment, or "immiseration," of the working class morphed into a Leftist claim of a "causal connection" between the success of advanced capitalist countries and the misery and poverty in the Third World, check out the article by Len Harris (author of the highly praised Al-Qaeda's Fantasy Ideolgy) in the current issue of Policy Review, The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing.
And as a tonic and counterweight to Marxist delusions, Andrew Sullivan delivers a masterful lecture on the subject of his PhD dissertation, Michael Oakeshott, which asserts the value of skepticism in the face of all claims of perfection and certainty in politics and governance.