Justice as Attunement: Transforming Constitutions in Law, Literature, Economics and the Rest of Life

The meaning of a text is shaped by various factors, including the language used, the cultural context, and the reader's background experience; it will be different not only to different people but also to the same person at different times. 'Attunement' is a way of paying attention to these fluid meanings. And, as this book shows, one perhaps surprising but practical reason for engaging in attunement is to learn to do justice to ourselves and to others. Attending to the motion of meaning can help us become more fully aware of an activity that all of us engage in all the time: the activity of constituting others and ourselves when we use our language. This is equally true at the level of a simple conversation between two people and at the level of establishing a national constitution.

Justice as Attunement, then, is a book about transforming constitutions across the range of human relations - constitutions of language and community: for, Richard Dawson suggests, the root of justice has to do with constituting appropriate selves and relations.