Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality

by Michael Walzer

The distinguished political philosopher and author of the widely acclaimed Just and Unjust Wars analyzes how society distributes not just wealth and power but other social “goods” like honor, education, work, free time—even love.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science, Academic, Law, Justice

364 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Michael Walzer is a Jewish American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor of the political-intellectual quarterly Dissent. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation and is a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many scholarly journals

Reviews

[Chris Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spheres of Justice represents Walzer’s half of a debate with Robert Nozick. (Nozick’s side of the debate is found in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which was also written as a response to Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Nozick defends a libertarian ideal of minimal government and a laissez-faire principle of distributive justice.)

Walzer argues for a conception of distributive justice that he refers to as “complex equality.” The idea is that there is no one correct principle of distribution that constitutes justice. Instead, there are different kinds of social goods—education, wealth, political power, etc.—and each constitutes a different “sphere.” Different forms of distribution are appropriate for different spheres. Justice might require strict equality in some spheres, merit-based distribution in another sphere, need-based distribution in yet another sphere, etc. Injustice, on Walzer’s view, consists primarily when one sphere, and its distribution of goods, comes to dominate other spheres. For example, if money and wealth became the dominant sphere in society (hard as that might be to imagine) and other goods such as education, healthcare, and political power were distributed according to wealth, then that would constitute injustice. Justice is primarily a matter of keeping the various spheres autonomous and distributing the goods of those spheres in ways that are independent of the distribution in other spheres. (A small number of people possessing most of the wealth would not necessarily constitute injustice if it meant only that those people had more material possessions. It is unjust when their wealth also gives them a greater share of the social goods in other spheres such as political power, control of the means of production, health care, etc.)

Also important is Walzer’s method. He rejects the idea that there might be one set of principles of distribution that determine justice for all societies and all times. Instead he insists that we must argue for principles of justice from the shared understandings of actual people. What sorts of things are good, and the principles of distribution appropriate for those goods, depends on the beliefs, values, and expectations of the actual members of society. It is this method ad its emphasis on how justice is determined (in part) by community standards that lumps Walzer into that group of political theorists who are collectively labeled “communitarians.”

Walzer’s general theory is presented in chapter 1 and the last chapter (13). The other (eleven) chapters each examine a particular kind of social good, searching for the form of distribution appropriate in that sphere and the potential for that sphere to dominate or be dominated by other spheres. This structure of the book allows for the reader to skip a few chapters, if desired. But fully understanding Walzer’s theory and appreciating its strength requires seeing how it applies to particular social issues and policy debates. It is especially important to read chapters 2, 3, 4, and 12 on membership (citizenship), security and welfare (including healthcare), money and commodities, and political power.

One drawback of Walzer’s approach is that his method of arguing from “shared cultural meanings” sometimes amounts to little more than an appeal to intuition. Opponents can reasonably dispute Walzer’s interpretation of the meaning of a particular good in our society. Nevertheless, Walzer’s theory is sophisticated yet simple and serves as a very useful and plausible analysis of a wide range of issues. Unlike many other communitarians, who offer only critiques of liberalism with little in the way of positive alternatives, Walzer argues for realistic communitarian approaches to contemporary political debates in our liberal society.

This book is making me rethink my general aversion to communitarian political theory.

[Mohammad Mirzaali · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب مفصل و دیگر کلاسیک‌شده‌ی مایکل والزر، فیسوف سیاسی بزرگ چپ در سنت رالزی، کتابی در توجیه یا مدلل‌ساختن عدالت نیست، بل‌که در تبیین نظریه‌ی «عدالت پیچیده» (در مقابل عدالت ساده‌ی کمونیستی) است. نویسنده پس از ایضاح مفهوم عدالت پیچیده، سراغ حوزه‌هایی می‌رود که عدالت در آن‌ها گستره‌ای از معنا خواهد داشت. او پیش‌نیازهای این این عدالت را بررسی می‌کند
حوزه‌های مدنظر والزر عبارت‌اند از: عضویت / امنیت و رفاه / پول و کالاها / منصب / کار سخت / اوقات فراغت / آموزش / خویشاوندی و عشق / فیض الهی / بازشناسی / قدرت سیاسی

باید از صالح نجفی بابت ترجمه‌ی این کتاب تشکر کرد. ترجمه‌‌ی قابل‌اعتمادی که به واقع همتی مدام می‌طلبیده است

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I want to argue that we should focus on the reduction of dominance—not, or not primarily, on the break-up or the constraint of monopoly. We should consider what it might mean to narrow the range within which particular goods are controvertible and to vindicate the autonomy of distributive spheres. But this line of argument, though it is not uncommon historically, has never fully emerged in philosophical writing. Philosophers have tended to criticize (or to justify) existing or emerging monopolies of wealth, power, and education. Or, they have criticized (or justified) particular conversions—of wealth into education or of office into wealth. And all this, most often, in the name of some radically simplified distributive system. The critique of dominance will suggest instead a way of reshaping and then living with the actual complexity of distributions." (17)

How should goods be distributed within societies? This is the question at the heart of Walzer's Spheres of Justice. Rather than take issue with monopolies, as has often been done before, Walzer argues that the most pressing problem for distributive justice is not monopoly per se but dominance, which occurs when individuals can command a wide range of different goods through the possession of one particular kind of good (e.g., people with more money being able to purchase better healthcare).

Walzer's main argument, then, is that we ought to focus on reducing dominance—or what he calls complex equality—as a matter of justice, not or not primarily on breaking up monopolies—or what he calls simple equality. Simple equality entails redistributing goods whenever certain people or groups have 'too much' of it, which appears to require strong, centralized power (someone/something has to do, and to be able to do, the redistributing). This power, however, is easily corrupted (Walzer points here to Marx and some of the disastrous results of communism). Complex equality, on the other hand, does not necessarily require redistribution—as long as the goods that some people have more of in one particular sphere do not convert to having more goods in other spheres (e.g., having more political should not mean that one also receives better education for one's children). According to Walzer, if the different spheres of goods that we value are relatively autonomous, then some people having a monopoly within any given sphere is not unjust. The goods that we value, moreover, and the way that these are distributed, change over time and are subject to ongoing valuation processes within societies. It is therefore important to study what goods we value, which is part of what Walzer does in his book.

Walzer calls the different areas of life and human societies in which certain goods are valued 'spheres'—there is the sphere of office, of the family, of power, of interpersonal relationships, of education, and so on. He is not particularly systematic or exhaustive in his discussion of the different spheres (to some of which he devotes much attention—entire chapters), the goods that are stake, or the ways in which goods are distributed in different spheres (he discusses many distributive mechanisms—like need, desert, free exchange, and so on—without always tying them closely to different goods). The result is a very rich and fruitful discussion, but not a philosophically rigorous one.

I did a very close reading of this book for my current postdoctoral position, where I'm working with Prof. Tamar Sharon, who has extended some of Walzer's arguments to the increasing influence of big tech companies in different spheres like health and medicine. Part of my research involves reflecting on how such 'sphere transgressions' can be problematic, especially from a moral perspective.

If you're interested, we have created a website called Sphere Transgression Watch where we keep track of such sphere transgressions by major big tech companies in many different spheres.

I have much more to say about Walzer, some of which will hopefully make its way into academic articles, so I'll leave things here for now.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer is, by his own account, a response to Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, one of the most prominent libertarian political philosophers of the twentieth century. In Spheres of Justice, Walzer, best-known for his work on the just war, defends some version of communitarianism, which stands in opposition to both the libertarianism of Nozick and the liberalism of John Rawls. That is, unlike Nozick and Rawls (whose theories of justice are themselves sharply opposed), Walzer offers an account of distributive justice that relies heavily on immanent and widely shared cultural interpretations of the various spheres that constitute social life. He does not, in other words, defend a principle of justice with recourse to abstract philosophical concepts (like natural human rights) or hypothetical contractual circumstances, but in view of how ordinary people in different societies are committed to various principles of distributive justice each of which pertains to a specific social sphere. Insofar as Walzer holds that principles of justice derive their normative force from values commonly espoused in a particular community or cultural tradition, his theory of justice is “communitarian” in character.

By the term “social sphere,” Walzer means to identify a relatively distinct arena of social life in which a particular social good is distributed. These goods include, for example, money and commodities, which are distributed in the sphere of the market; education, which is distributed in the sphere of the school system; and civic membership, which is distributed in the sphere of the political community. For Walzer, the distributive principle within a sphere is determined by how individuals mutually understand the social good associated with that sphere. As he explains, before individuals distribute goods, they conceive and create them, and because they come into people’s minds before they come into their hands, distributions are formulated in accordance with shared conceptions of what the goods are and what they are for. Walzer takes this as a clue to how we should understand distributive justice. He concludes that the principles of justice are “pluralistic in form”: different social goods should be distributed for different reasons, which derive from different collective conceptions of the social goods themselves (6). Note here how Walzer moves from a descriptive claim about the basis for or source of distributive principles to a normative claim that these principles are principles of justice. For Walzer, there is no problem here: moral norms are only ever local, not universal, and how we come to know them is necessarily by way of historical processes. The social contract, to the extent it makes sense to speak of one, is not constructed so much as disclosed within the customs of a political community and its shared history. Hence the political theorist’s task is to interpret and map the social world so as to identify what we value, how we value it, and which principle should determine its allocation. Spheres of Justice is a work in hermeneutics.

Walzer contends that his theory of justice aims at “complex equality,” which contrasts with what he calls “simple equality.” Simple equality, he explains, denotes a pattern of distribution in which one dominant social good is distributed equally between individuals. For example, suppose that money is the dominant good in our society, where “dominant good” refers to some good that can be converted into almost any other good, such that to possess that good is to have access to all the other social goods (11). When money is distributed equally between individuals, this constitutes a situation of simple equality. Simple equality is meant to prevent monopoly over dominant social goods, but Walzer thinks that it has several deficiencies. For starters, he claims that it is unstable: as soon as money, for instance, is equally distributed between individuals, subsequent transfers immediately lead to a situation of inequality, not only with respect to the amount of money people have but also in terms of the other goods individuals choose to purchase with their equal shares. To the extent that a system of simple equality can be made more stable, this would require a centralized and interventionist state to constrain new monopolies and constantly redistribute the dominant social good. Yet if the state performed this function, then state power itself would become the dominant good that individuals would seek to monopolize in order to control other social goods. Hence Walzer believes that simple equality leads to a vicious, coercive cycle: “We will mobilize power to check monopoly, then look for some way [to check] the power we have mobilized” (16). He finds this political vision unattractive.

If simple equality is meant to constrain monopoly, complex equality is meant to reduce dominance—specifically, dominance over other distributive spheres made possible by the possession of some dominant social good. For Walzer, complex equality denotes a pattern of distribution in which multiple social goods are distributed each within their respective spheres and cannot be converted into other goods in other spheres with their own distributive principles. For example, money is distributed in accordance with the principle of free transfer and can be appropriately converted into a variety of goods, like automobiles or clothes, in the sphere of the market. Offices, on the other hand, are distributed in accordance with the principle of merit and so cannot (or at least should not) be purchased with money. Similarly, in the sphere of security and welfare, the principle of need applies, and so money should not be able to purchase better police protection or even better health care. The distributive principle behind complex equality is: “No social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x” (20). When this principle is violated—when the principle operative in one sphere intrudes on the pattern of distribution in another (when offices are distributed in accordance with the free transfer of money, for instance)—there is injustice. Conversely, insofar as domination of this sort is blocked, equality is protected.

Walzer’s theory of complex equality demonstrates that, for him, justice is structured by two interrelated imperatives: faithfulness and separateness. First, justice requires that, as members of a political community or cultural tradition, we remain faithful to our shared conceptions of social goods and the distributive principles associated with them. While, of course, cultural interpretations of social goods need not be static and will inevitably evolve over time, what is imperative is that we remain attuned to our shared conceptions, whatever they are, and not override them (or let anyone else override them). Second, justice also requires that we constantly maintain the various spheres’ autonomy, i.e. that we do not allow the distributive principle of one sphere to dominate another. The task of justice is not to invent a uniform and universal standard of distribution for all the social spheres (like, say, Rawls’s difference principle), but to keep the diverse spheres orderly and distinct.

There are at least two main objections to Walzer’s theory of justice. The first has to do with his rejection of Rawlsian liberalism and its two principles of justice. Rawls is a constant foil for Walzer: whereas Walzer articulates his theory by way of interpretation, social criticism, and cultural particularity, Rawls proceeds by way of abstraction, hypothetical contractual circumstances, and (in Theory of Justice, at least) universality. Yet Walzer never systematically discredits the method by which Rawls arrives at his principles of justice. Rather, he simply asserts that a theory of justice should draw from our already established ideas about distributive justice, then criticizes Rawls’s account insofar as it does not prioritize our widely shared cultural interpretations. As far as I can tell, Walzer never really explains why a theory of justice must incorporate our shared conceptions; in the first chapter, he states that “the question most likely to arise in the minds of the members of a political community is not, What would rational individuals choose [under the conditions of the original position]? But rather, What would individuals like us choose, who are situated as we are?” (5). But merely because this is the question that is most likely to arise in the minds of, say, most Americans, does not explain why a theory of justice must take this speculative empirical fact into account. Without such an explanation, Walzer’s account for why Rawlsian liberalism is deficient simply assumes the truth of his own theory without demonstration. Moreover, it also fails to consider the extent to which Rawls does reserve a place for shared conceptions within the justificatory method of reflective equilibrium, which draws on our considered convictions about what is just and unjust.

The second main objection to Walzer’s theory of justice has to do with its relativism. On the one hand, it is fair to describe his account of complex equality as a qualified non-relative theory. It is non-relative in the sense that, for example, the distributive principle behind complex equality is an objective, universal principle of distribution. It is, admittedly, a rather open-ended principle, and Walzer claims that its purpose is to focus our attention, to direct us to study what shared conceptions we have with respect to diverse social goods. Still, were this principle not objective and universal, Walzer’s theory would immediately break down. Beyond this, Walzer also mentions the principle of mutual aid in his discussion of the distribution of civic membership. The collective version of mutual aid, he insists, attenuates the broad permission afforded to nations to determine their own admissions policies: when the costs for nations to admit populations in dire need are low relative to the need of those who seek admittance—as they typically are when distributed over an entire population—nations should have to admit those needy populations (45). This principle is, as Walzer presents it, objective and universal.

On the other hand, Walzer readily embraces the relativity of justice. “Justice is relative to social meanings,” he flatly states (312). “Every substantive account of distributive justice is a local account” (314). As Walzer explains in the last chapter of Spheres of Justice, this means that in a society whose shared conceptions of social goods are necessarily linked with hierarchy, “justice will come to the aid of inequality,” or at least simple inequality (313). He offers the example of the caste system in India and concedes that, if all the inhabitants of a particular Indian community really do accept the doctrines that support the caste system, then there is no injustice when the community’s resources are distributed unequally in accordance with caste. Indeed, for Walzer, the only injustice would be to impose on members of this community a different, more democratic distributive system in opposition to their shared conceptions. Beyond the fact that, in this example at least, it seems that the (metaphysical) principle of distribution in the sphere of religion has intruded upon the principle of distribution in the sphere of welfare (why should caste determine how communal resources are allocated? Has not one sphere come to dominate another?), I think Walzer has conceded too much to the authority of shared conceptions of social goods. Even if these conceptions were as widely shared as Walzer presumes they often are (he admits that there is not always widespread consensus about how to understand a social good and its distributive principle), the best that social critics can ever do on this account is to recall a community to itself, to make manifest ideals that are latent and unrealized. Walzer may be a democratic socialist (his political vision is, it should be said, extremely attractive; I would endorse almost every aspect of it as presented in the last chapter), but his theory of justice is ultimately rather conservative, with little to no room for radical social transformation or cross-cultural moral criticism.

[Ralph Palm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've wanted to read this book for a long time, but overall I was somewhat disappointed. It is much more an assertion than an argument, and certainly not the "defense of pluralism and equality" promised in the subtitle.

The basic problem is with the 'boundaries' between the spheres. According to Walzer, 'tyranny' is any transgression of one sphere into the realm of another (e.g. the influence of wealth on politics). However, the boundaries between these spheres are constructs, "vulnerable to shifts in social meaning." So, crossing the line is illegitimate, but where the line is drawn is, in effect, arbitrary. While Walzer recognizes this problem, he doesn't go far enough in solving it. In fact, it undermines his entire thesis.

A hypothetically stronger case could have been made by grounding the spheres and their boundaries in some way. Walzer seems to be under the impression that this would be an illegitimate universalization, implying that his theory was applicable to all societies at all times. That would of course not work (e.g. given that pluralism is also essential, etc.). But he could have offered some sort of performative or conditional grounds, i.e. 'If a society works in such and such a way, or has such and such features, then the boundary between sphere x and sphere y is this.' Instead of giving even this limited sort of definition, he simply takes them as (historical) givens. However, philosophically speaking, this leaves the ground of his argument arbitrary and dogmatic.

Thus, one might be able to use Walzer's theory to make historical judgments on matters of justice, but not in any critical or productive way. In other words, using Walzer's theory, one could say "We think that was just" but not "In order to be just, we should do this." It is a justice for moral spectators, not moral agents.

Well, back to the drawing board....

[Carsen Codel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The dominion of citizenship, unlike the dominion of grace (or money, or office, or education, or birth and blood), is not tyrannical; it is the end of tyranny.”

“Justice is relative to social meanings… we cannot say what is due to this person or that one until we know how these people relate to one another… there cannot be a just society until there is a society; and the adjective ‘just’ doesn’t determine, it only modifies, the substantive life of the societies it describes.”

What Walzer does in this book has driven my political and moral ethos since I was first exposed to its central idea: that creating a just society doesn’t rely on divining some abstract conception of justice and morality, but rather of allowing citizens to determine justice for themselves, so long as the operations of social goods and their distributions stay within their respective confines.

Such an idea counters simple equality and Rawls’ egalitarianism by recognizing that there cannot be one distributive principle to rule each aspect of our lives — doing so takes away the nuance.

The idea also counters the revolutionary idealism of Marxism, by demonstrating that simply overthrowing power only replaces it with a new source, and without proper demarcations will only result in tyranny under a new name. Walzer isn’t against collectivism - he actively encourages cooperative factories throughout the book - but he does recognize that their collective power should end at the factory doors.

It all makes sense - it’s not necessarily bad to be rich on its own, but it is bad when it allows said rich person to gain power or influence outside of the market sphere. Likewise, having a certain credential is no promise of respect or political power.

There is beauty to me in Walzer’s conceptions of such a society — that it allows for constructivism and self-determination through collective action, and that it engenders each citizen with a sense of self-respect, which in turn becomes the engine driving the whole machine.

[Leonardo]

...el universalismo implicado en la posición recursivista de Rawls fue muy cuestionado. La corriente contemporánea más crítica en este sentido ha sido el “comunitarismo”. Uno de los representantes más conocidos de este tipo de crítica al planteo rawlsiano es Michael Walzer, con su libro Spheres of Justice (1983).

Teoría de la Justicia. Clase 3.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

برابری در معنای تحت اللفظی اش ، آرمانی است که جان می دهد برای خیانت کردن. مردان و زنان پای بند این آرمان ، همین که جنبشی را در دفاع از برابری سازمان می دهند و قدرت، مناصب و نفوذ و تاثیرگذاری را در میان خود توزیع می کنند، بدان آرمان خیانت کرده یا به نظر می رسد چنین می کنند.

[Serge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very important book. Going to include it in readings for Senior Independent Project and Project Term. most intered in Walzer's articulation of the relatonship of punishment to justice. Here are my notes

Philosophy and Criminal Justice

Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality by Michael Walzer

P.3 Different political arrangements enforce , and different ideologies justify, different distributions of membership, power, honor, ritual eminence, divine grace, kinship and love, knowledge, physical security, work and leisure, rewards and punishments, and a host of goods more narrowly and materially conceived– food, shelter, clothing, transportation, medical care, commodities of every sort, and all the odd things (paintings, rare books, postage stamps) that human beings collect.

P.5 Justice is a human construction, and it is doubtful that it can be made in only one way.

P.9 Social meanings are historical in character; and so distributions, and just and unjust distributions, change over time…. Again, punishment has been widely understood as a negative good that ought to go to people who are judged to deserve it on the basis of a verdict , not of a political decision (But what constitutes a verdict? Who is to deliver it? How, in short, is justice to be done to accused men and women?)

P.11 When goods are scarce and widely needed. Like water in the desert, monopoly itself will make them dominant. Mostly however, dominance is a more elaborate social creation, the work of many hands , mixing reality and symbol.

Distribution is what social conflict is all about… History reveals no single dominant good and no naturally dominant good, but only different kinds of magic and competing bands of magicians

P.15 One way of limiting political power is to distribute it widely. This may not work, given the well-canvassed dangers of majority tyranny; but these dangers are probably less acute that they are often made out to be.

P.16 The distributive struggles of the modern age begin with a war against the aristocracy’s singular hold on land, office, and honor. This seems an especially pernicious monopoly because it rests upon birth and blood, with which the individual has nothing to do, rather than upon wealth, or power, or education, all of which– at least in principle– can be earned.

P.18 [Pensees by Pascal] Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another. We owe different duties to different qualities: love is the proper response to charm, fear to strength, and belief to learning.

P.23 The love of particular men and women, on our understanding of it, can only be distributed by themselves, and they are rarely guided in these matters by considerations of desert.

P.24 Desert does not have the urgency of need and it does not involve having (owning and consuming) in the same way… Of course public provision is always possible alongside the market, and we might argue that artistically cultivated people deserve not pictures but museums. Perhaps they do, but they don’t deserve that the rest of us contribute money or appropriate public funds for the purchase of pictures and the construction of buildings. They will have to persuade us that art is worth the money; they will have to stimulate and encourage our own artistic cultivation. And if they fail to do that, their own love of art may well turn out to be “impotent and a misfortune.”

P.27 Can we imagine a society in which all goods are hierarchically conceived?... We think of castess as rigidly segregated groups, of the caste system as a “plural society,” a world of boundaries. But the system is constituted by an extraordinary integration of meanings. Prestige, wealth, knowledge, office, occupation, food, clothing, even the social good of conversation: all are subject to the intellectual as well as to the physical discipline of hierarchy.

P.32 Membership as a social good is constituted by our understanding; its value is fixed by our work and conversation; and then we are in charge (who else would be in charge?) of its distribution.

P.33 Groups of people ought to help necessitous strangers whom they somehow discover in their midst or on their path. But the limit on risks and costs in these cases is sharply drawn. I need not take the injured stranger into my home, except briefly, and I certainly need to care for him or even associate with him for the rest of my life.

P.41 Clearly, citizens often believe themselves morally bound to open the doors of their country – not to anyone who wants to come in, perhaps, but to a particular group of outsiders, recognized as national or “ethnic” relatives.

P.48 Some places in the world will still be more desirable than others, either to individual men and women with particular tastes and aspirations, or more generally. Some places will still be uncomfortable for at least some of the inhabitants. Hence immigration with remain an issue even after the claims of distributive justice have been met on a global scale…

P.54 On Aristotle’s view, slaves and aliens lived in the realm of necessity; their fate was determined by the conditions of economic life. Citizens, by contrast, lived in the realm of choice; their fate was determined in the political arena by their own collective decisions

P.55 Can states run their economies with live-in servants, guest workers, excluded from the company of citizens?

P.56 It is crucial that the workers who are admitted should be “guests,” not immigrants seeking a new home and a new citizenship.

P.57 They are either prevented or discouraged from bringing dependents along with them, and they are housed in barracks, segregated by sex , o the outskirts of the cities where they work. Mostly they are young men and women in their twenties or thirties; finished with education, not yet infirm, they are a minor drain on local welfare services…

P.62 The determination of aliens and guests by an exclusive ban of citizens ( or of slaves by masters, or women by men, or blacks by whites, or conquered peoples by their conquerors) is not communal freedom but oppression.

P.95 There are two questions with regard to money: What can it buy? And how is it distributed? The two must be taken up in that order, for only after we have described the sphere within which money operates, and the scope of its operations, can we sensibly address its distribution. We must figure out how important money really is.

P.105 The normal activities that enable individuals to see themselves and to be seen by others as full members, social persons, have increasingly become consumption activities; they require money.

P.136 Desert implies a very strict sort of entitlement, such that the title precedes and determines the selection, while qualification is a much looser idea. A prize, for example, can be deserved because it already belongs to the person who has given the best performance; it remains only to identify that person.

P.151 Equality is always relative; it requires us to compare the treatment of this individual to some set of others, not to all others. We can always change the distributive system simply by redrawing the boundaries. There is no single set of just boundaries (though there are unjust boundaries– that is, those that enclose people, as in a ghetto, against their will)

P.153 Just as we could not adopt a system of preventive detention without violating the rights of innocent people, even if we weighed fairly the costs and benefits of the system as a whole, so we can’t adopt a quota system without violating the rights of candidates.

P.239 The sphere of private affairs can never be a stable place. The market in commodities works because the men and women who trade in commodities are connected elsewhere (most often to their families). But here men and women trade themselves, and they are radically disconnected, free-floating subjects.

P.245 The First Amendment is a rule of complex equality. It does not distribute grace equally; indeed it does not distribute it at all. Nevertheless, the wall that it raises has profound distributive effects. It makes, on the religious side, for the priesthood of all believers; that is, it leaves all believers in charge of their own salvation.

P.248 The idea of grace seems deeply resistant to coercive distributions. Locke’s assertion that “men cannot be forced to be saved,” may represent the claim of a dissenter or even a skeptic, but it builds on an understanding of salvation shared by many believers.

P.268 [Punishment] All citizens are innocent until proven guilty, but this maxim does not call for universal respect but the universal absence of disrespect…. Punishment, like honor, is a singling out. Indeed, punishment is more like a grand prize than an honors list, in that we punish individuals for single acts… not for a bad life

Punishment is a powerful stigma; it dishonors its victim. According to the Biblical account, God put a mark on Cain in order to protect him; but the mark branded him a murderer, and so it was a punishment ; and though all of us would be grateful for divine protection, no one wants to bear the mark of Cain
[deter..condemn… reform]

P.269 But if punishment is dishonorable, as it is, then it must be the case that individual men and women deserve or do not deserve to be dishonored. And then it is critically important that we find the right people, that we put the mark of Cain on Cain

There is a kind of moral anxiety that attends the practice of punishment and probably has as much to do with the dishonor as with the coercion and pain that punishment involves. Coercion and pain are also a feature of military service , where they don’t generate the same anxiety or set us looking for deserving men and women.

P.270 Ostracism was something very different, and it was different precisely because the exiled citizen was not judged but elected by his peers. The procedure was designed in the very early days of the democratic regime to permit the citizens to get rid of powerful or ambitious individuals, who might aim at tyranny or whose rivalries threatened the peace of the city. Hence ostracism was a kind of political defeat, one of the risks of democratic politics.

P.271 The idea behind preventive detention is that we should fill our prisons through a search for qualified candidates – men and women likely to act badly– just as we fill our offices through a search for men and women likely to act well.

P.272 Detained men and women are punished for reasons that don’t connect with our ordinary understanding of what punishment is and how it ought to be distributed. The detention, then, is an act of tyranny.

P.273 In this sense, hierarchical societies reiterate again and again, for each successive rank except the last , the joy that Tertullian claimed the saints would feel when they watched the sufferings of the damned.. They would cease to be happy, as Rousseau says of the rich and the powerful, the moment the people below them “ceased to be wretched.”

P.283 Sovereignty does not extend to enslavement; state officials cannot seize the persons of their subjects (who are also their fellow citizens), compel their services, imprison or kill them– except in accordance with procedures agreed to by the subjects themselves or by their representatives and for reasons derived from the shared understandings of criminal justice…

P.289 Similarly, our understanding of the purpose of a prison (and the meaning of punishment and the social roles of judges, wardens, and prison guards) sets limits to the exercise of power within its walls. I am sure that those limits are often violated. In the best of circumstances, a prison is a brutal place; the daily routine is cruel, and the warden and the guards are often tempted to intensify the cruelty. Sometimes when they do so, they express their own fear; sometimes– for the same walls that imprison the convicts set warden and guards free– they express a particularly virulent form of the insolence of the office. The rest of us can, nevertheless, recognize the violations. Given a factual account of prison conditions, we can say whether the warden has acted beyond his powers. And when the prisoners claim that he has done so, they appeal to the sovereign and the law and ultimately, to the civic consciousness of the citizens.

[Jim Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

This belongs on your bookshelf if also sitting there are Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia.

Although not published until a decade or so after these other, perhaps more famous books, it is very much a stimulating conversation with them. Spheres is movingly and intelligently written with deep humanity, and I highly recommend it, regardless where you sit on the political spectrum.

[Read Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good short-ish read that builds well off of Nozick and Rawls.
After Rawls' look at equality through a fair redistributed state, Nozick responded with a brilliant defense of a minimalist state with which I don't agree personally but have great respect for just due to how well he lays it out.
This book by Walzer advances equality into "complex equality" basically by dividing life into spheres that are not allowed to affect one another : where wealth buys swimming pools but not respect, free time or political power; political power does not generate wealth, respect is produced by social activities that minimize the time for money and political activity, etc.
This is quite interesting and laid out in a way i like that others may not. Walzer frequently admits not knowing the exact implication of a thought or how to implement a proposed change, but leaves readers with a batch of well-thought-out and coherent ideas that i have not seen argued before.

[Amin Riahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

ادعانامه‌ای علیه نیاندیشیدن

[Michel Lamblin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walzer's complex equality is a fairly particularist and descriptive account of how the different social goods (that we, members of a particular community, have decided are social goods) are to be distributed fairly within their respective spheres without interference or dominance from another sphere. For example, money and commodities are to be traded in the sphere of the free market, following its fair rules (free exchange), and the dominance of that social good, viz., wealth, shouldn't interfere with the fair distribution of, say, office, education, welfare, love, divine grace, esteem and respect, and—very importantly—politics.

Those other spheres just mentioned are all their own chapters in Spheres of Justice (I probably forgot two or three other spheres) and Walzer has plenty of interesting things to say about how the social goods that populate their respective spheres are fairly distributed, drawing on not just philosophers but also on many writers like Shakespeare and Shaw. And a lot of Walzer's reasoning is, well, reasonable, as "we"—people who are moderately knowledgeable of Western political philosophy and/or are, politically, moderately left of center—also share in many of Walzer's intuitions and go along with most of what he has to say. Hence his account of complex equality is safely descriptive, not veering far from the shared intuitions of the post-WWII Western world. And that's fine, of course—it is how most political philosophers operate, as deductive argument from supposedly universal principles (there aren't any in a pluralistic world) is strongly out of fashion by this point. And "we" have a pretty varied set of stable intuitions regarding social goods—intuitions that have been tried and tested in "experiments of living," not on our own (Mill's recipe for individual liberalism), but together. So why not use them?

Walzer is prescribing as well; it's not all descriptive. The autonomy and separateness of the spheres is one such normative claim. But another big one seems to be that the political sphere—where the power resides, among the people in a democracy, for the people to discuss and make claims about the boundaries of all the spheres, and where they "try to prevent illegitimate crossings" (p. 281) between the spheres—is the "appropriate setting for this enterprise," (p. 28) the enterprise being how best to distribute the social goods... for a particular political community. Expanding the political sphere to "humanity itself, the society of nations, the entire globe," is problematic because "we would have to imagine what does not yet exist: a community that included all men and women everywhere. We would have to invent a set of common meanings for those people, avoiding if we could the stipulation of our own values." (pp. 29-30) So, again: a fairly particularist prescription. And he acknowledges as much, that his resulting theory "is unlikely to be elegant. No account of the meaning of a social good, or of the boundaries of the sphere within which it legitimately operates, will be uncontroversial." (p. 21) Likewise, there's no pithy way to summarize all his arguments here, so I'll end the rambling. I liked his chapters on Membership (very important to consider how the political community is formed), Money and Commodities (strong arguments for the corrupting force this sphere can have on other spheres), Recognition (which includes a nice contrast between 'self-esteem' and 'self-respect', the latter being a basic requirement for democratic citizenship) and Political Power (which has an interesting account of Pullman, Illinois, one of the first planned cities, which highlights the limits of ownership when it attempts to illegitimately cross from the sphere of business to that of the political community).

I will leave my favorite passage here, where Walzer takes a punch at Rawls's veil of ignorance and the impossibility of an "unencumbered self" (Michael Sandel's focus in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which also takes aim at Rawls) being able to agree to the principles of justice per Rawls's contractualist starting point.

The impulse at work here is closely related to the impulse that leads contemporary philosophers to ignore the concrete meaning of social goods. Persons abstracted from their qualities and goods abstracted from their meanings lend themselves, of course, to distributions that accord with abstract principles. But it seems doubtful that such distributions can possibly do justice to persons as they are, in search of goods as they conceive them. We don't encounter other people as moral and psychological blanks, neutral bearers of accidental qualities. It isn't as if there is X and then there are X's qualities, so that I can react separately to the one and the other. The problem that justice poses is precisely to distribute goods to a host of Xs in ways that are responsive to their concrete, integrated selves. Justice, that is, begins with persons. More than this, it begins with persons-in-the-social-world, with goods in their minds as well as in their hands. (p. 261)

[Renato Garín · Rating 3 out of 5]

Publicada en 1983, la obra se aleja de las concepciones abstractas y universalistas de la justicia, y en su lugar, ofrece un enfoque contextual que reconoce la diversidad de criterios distributivos en distintas esferas sociales. A continuación, se desgranan los argumentos centrales del libro:

Justicia como distribución diferenciada: Walzer propone que no hay un único principio distributivo que sea aplicable de manera uniforme a todos los bienes sociales. En lugar de ello, cada esfera de la sociedad tiene su propio criterio intrínseco de distribución, basado en el significado social del bien en cuestión.

Concepción de las esferas: Para Walzer, la sociedad está compuesta por diversas esferas, cada una con su propio conjunto de bienes y criterios distributivos. Por ejemplo, en la esfera educativa, el mérito podría ser el criterio predominante, mientras que en la esfera de la salud, podría ser la necesidad.

Idea del bien interno: Cada esfera posee un "bien interno" que determina su criterio distributivo. Este bien refleja el valor o significado social de la esfera y es esencial para comprender cómo deberían distribuirse los recursos dentro de ella.

Crítica a la dominación y la tiranía: Uno de los argumentos centrales de Walzer es que la justicia requiere que se evite la dominación de una esfera sobre otra. Cuando un tipo de bien (por ejemplo, el dinero) otorga poder en muchas o todas las esferas, se produce una injusticia. La autonomía de cada esfera debe ser protegida para evitar la tiranía de una sobre las demás.

Monopolios complejos: Walzer critica lo que denomina "monopolios complejos". Estos surgen cuando una persona o grupo tiene una posición dominante en varias esferas a la vez, permitiendo así una influencia indebida en la sociedad.

Rechazo del universalismo abstracto: A diferencia de teóricos como John Rawls, Walzer rechaza la idea de un principio universal de justicia. En su lugar, defiende un enfoque contextual que reconozca las particularidades de cada sociedad y cultura.

Ética comunitaria: El enfoque de Walzer se enmarca dentro de la ética comunitaria. Afirma que nuestras concepciones de justicia están arraigadas en las tradiciones y prácticas compartidas de comunidades específicas. La justicia, en este sentido, no es una abstracción, sino una práctica vivida y contextual.

[Tristan Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a part of this for a class, and that’s what made me decide to follow through and read the whole thing. Overall, I think it’s got a lot of really good and insightful bits that can spark good conversation, but I also think that might be better done by focusing on chapters that are interesting (e.g. Chapters 6, 7 & 8) and pulling out the parts from others that hold up (like the bit on nepotism from Chapter 5). Great pieces are held within, and this book did get me to think more deeply about the world, but overall too much abstract that didn’t strike me, so you’re better to chisel away and focus on the gems that lie within.

The start was remarkably slow, Walzer laying the groundwork for the basis upon which he was making this book, perhaps necessary but not really moving, even for someone fairly amenable to his overall argument.

Sadly, I found that most of the book was not nearly as compelling as the bit I had first engaged with (the case of Pullman Illonios) and repeatedly felt I could understand the issue he was sketching but found no sense of how it could change the way I interact with the world because of a lack of any focus on what to do based on these insights. I thought the Office chapter fell into this category, where I thought he had some insightful bits on what exactly the problem looks like here (like what exactly is wrong with nepotism) but with so little in the “what can we do to fix this?” vein that I felt it was an unproductive exploration.

He did still wow me in certain areas though. I really liked his treatment of degrading work, and felt that the solution of potentially having everyone spend a bit of time doing such work maped really well onto my conviction that we should all spend more time walking in the shoes of others. I also found his insight into the switch from vacation to free time to be totally new to me, and something that’s definitely stuck with me as a good question to consider further after reading.

[Pierce Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for GOVT 86: "Contemporary Readings on Justice" at Dartmouth. This book was confusing but my professor explained it to me in such a way that made it a great complement to reading Rawls. Since revisiting this text, I've enjoyed how it complicates a lot of Rawls' notions around simple equality and distribution.

[Serena]

Read for Asylum Seeker Policy unit at university.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A simultaneously utopian and unappealing conception of justice. However, it is occasionally thought provoking and the idea of 'Complex Equality' is an interesting one.

[João Martins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening in a lot of randomly philosophical-empirical ways. A manifesto for a true democracy, not without its contradictions and lapses.

[Sara Pritchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

More sociology than philosophy, but nonetheless essential reading for anyone interested in the moral limits of markets.

[Dz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let’s talk about it 💔

[Nick Geiser · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book's primary value is as a historical document. One of the distinctive features of Walzer's view of "complex equality" is that it is really a theory about the distribution of particular goods. This was a radical departure from other theories of distributive justice which were trying to work out what goods persons were owed rather than to which persons goods should go. It also perhaps offered a breath of fresh air from the literature on the meaning of equality (resources? primary goods? welfare?) by turning to particular kinds of goods. As Walzer says, "there is no single set of primary or basic goods conceivable across all moral and material worlds" (p. 8). I guess that's how he got someone of Judith Thompson's stature to write a blurb on the back.

The problem for Walzer is that he doesn't want to go down the Aristotelian route and start talking about how we should give flutes to the best flute players because it's in the "nature of flutes" to be played well. Instead, he thinks that the distribution of particular goods should reflect the "social meanings" those goods have attracted, and that those social meanings are determined by both history and democracy.

However, history and collective choice are at loggerheads. History limits what a democracy can do, and democracy tries to go beyond history, and Walzer has no principled way to adjudicate between them. Walzer admits as much when he writes:

“we never know exactly where to put the fences; they have no natural location… boundaries, then, are vulnerable to shifts in social meaning, and we have no choice but to live with the continual probes and incursions through which these shifts are worked out” (p. 319)

That's basically hand-waving at the problem and saying "Yeah I guess it all somehow works out." I guess this gets you into the Institute for Advanced Study.

Walzer also has no account for how the social meanings of goods change. His ideal is one in which goods are monopolistically held (held only for the appropriate reasons) and inconvertible. Not is this a completely static view of the world, it is also a deeply illiberal one. An Open Society is one where the meaning of goods is a product of a people freely interacting with one another, not something given from on high ex ante.

There's also Walzer's disastrous discussion of commodification, which confuses things that cannot conceptually be sold (love) with things that are intrinsically wrong to do (buying and selling human beings) with things that are incidentally wrong to sell (exemptions from military/jury service, e.g.).

Contemporary theorists should avoid Walzer like the plague.

[Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walzer aims for complex equality, a system where justice is determined relative to each sphere of social goods and no ruling characteristic, office or good in one sphere dominates any other sphere. A few of the insights that interested me, especially per human rights, were these:

re women
"In English language, the common title is 'master,' elided to 'Mr.,' which became in the 17th century 'the customary ceremonious prefix to the name of any man below the level of knight and above some humble but undefined level of social status.... As with other titles of courtesy, the inferior limit for its application has been continually lowered.'

"It is a matter of real importance that there is no title for women comparable to 'Mr.' for men. Even after the democratic revolution, women continued to be called by names (like 'Miss' and 'Mrs.') that described their place in the family , not in society at large. Women were 'placed' by the place of their kin and were not expected to make their own way. The invention of 'Ms.' is a desperate remedy: an abbreviation for which there is not corresponding word. In part, the argument I am about to make applies to women as much as to men, but only in part. The absence of a universal title suggestion the continued exclusion of women, or of many women, from the social universe, the sphere of recognition as it is currently constituted." (252)

re membership, not in a state, but in humanity
"Tocqueville thought non-recognitions impossible under the old regime--and also unnecessary: one snubbed a man by letting him know (that you knew) his place. Under the new regime, no one has a fixed place; one snubs a man by denying that he is there, that he has any place at all. One refuses to recognize his personality or his moral or political existence." (253)

and maybe to illumine Young's idea of democratic participation
"What touches all should be decided by all."
It seems obvious to suggest that those affected should have some say, but one needs only look at the family as a unit to see this is not always so.

I did enjoy Walzer's vision of how to accommodate plurality and specificity in a universalish theory of justice.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good book. While Walzer is certainly exhaustive, perhaps he gets a bit boring, though. In all, he does a great job laying out a theory based on separate spheres of society (politics, economics, work, family, etc.) each of which is exclusive from others. In other words, one's power in one sphere should not affect one's power in another. This would be tyrannic.

Walzer does a great job pointing out how money nowadays is a dominant good and allows one to purchase influence in all other spheres (which is tyrannic). I'm surprised, given the Occupy movement, more haven't (re)picked up this book.

[Soha Bayoumi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that happens to be important in contemporary political philosophy, though full of historical, anthropological and economic fallacies and bad documentation, besides some communitarian-flavored fascism... It is a very good expression of communitarianism as a political philosophy seeking to reconcile people with the status quo under a "communitarian" ideal, though Walzer cites Marx every three pages, he who believed that the aim of understanding the world is to change it!!!

[José Joaquín Fernández · Rating 1 out of 5]

There can’t be any justice if you deny, as this book does, the principles of individual Liberty and respect of private property, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

The author says: “the animating passions of egalitarian politics are envy and resentment”. Well, this is a book advocating egalitarianism. Also, the author says: “My purpose in this book is to describe … an egalitarianism that is consistent with liberty”. But, this is contradictory.

[Mattschratz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Performs the admirable service of rendering clearly and coherently all of the things you had thought went without saying about political life in a (seventeenth C. definition) liberal society until you tried talking about it to *that* uncle at Thanksgiving. So you know, useful.

[David Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

A staple philosophical book.

[LJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

just started reading this one- the preface is great enough, :-). I plan to finish it this week-end.
Finished reading... but no time to write a review yet. ne

[Kony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Caveat: My rating here probably reflects my growing dislike for this whole genre.

Academic political philosophy = meh.

If you're into this stuff, don't mind me and my two stars.