Constitutive concept of justice and problem of stability of a just order in Solon’s political legislation

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to show Solon‘s political reforms, the constitutive concept of justice in which those reforms were based, and the problem of stability, from the perspective of incorporating traditional norms and relations in which justice is represented as a response to social conflicts in Athena from the beginning of the sixth century BC. The operational principles through which comparisons and evaluation are established are connected with the principles of distributivity, equivalence, correlation, and publicity . The choice of these principles for establishing evaluations of Solon‘s political reforms is justified by the fact that according to the early reasoning in the Hellenic experience, justice is considered as a relation between the interested parties. Particular attention is placed on the incorporation of these principles into Solon‘s written legislation, which is synonymous with the Hellenistic experience of the process of transition from oral (customary) to written legislation, as well as to the question of the principles of stability of the political order.