Michael  Walzer  and  Spheres  of  Justice  

By  Margaret  Moore.  

Michael  Walzer  is  widely  regarded  as  one  of  America’s  foremost  political  theorists  

and  public  intellectuals,  whose  work  has  spanned  many  of  the  most  important  

topics  in  political  thought  –  theories  of  just  war,  terrorism,  toleration,  distributive  

justice,  democracy,  multiculturalism,  the  rules  of  international  society,  as  well  as  

methodological  questions  relating  to  how  to  do  normative  political  theory.      His  

work  on  distributive  justice  -­‐-­‐    Spheres  of  Justice  (1983)  -­‐-­‐  is  a  rich  and  compelling  

defense  of  a  particular  idea  of  equality,    which  marked  a  significant  departure  from  

most  Rawlsian-­‐inspired  political  thought  at  the  time.  Most  of  these  writings  were  

characterized  by  fairly  abstract  reasoning,  designed  to  elucidate  a  theory  of  

distributive  justice,  such  as  Rawls’s  (1971)  original  position,  Dworkin’s    (1981)  

island  auction  of  seashells,  Ackerman’s  (1980)  spaceship,  or  Nozick’s  (1974)  

experience  machine.  These  heuristic  devices  were  designed  to  assist  the  reader  in  

thinking  about  problems  of  justice  or  the  state  free  from  irrelevant  considerations,  

and  so  enable  the  reader  or  philosopher  to  hone  in  on  key  features  without  

distraction.      By  contrast,  Walzer’s  political  theory  proceeds  through  the  use  of  

examples,  usually  historical  examples  or  examples  drawn  from  the  news,  and  

involve  a  richly  drawn  characterization  of  the  context  in  which  the  case  arises.    This  

is  one  of  the  distinctive  aspects  of  Spheres  of  Justice:    there  is  an  incredibly  rich  set  of  

social  practices  analyzed  in  the  course  of  the  book  -­‐    health  care  in  the  medieval  

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Jewish  community,  gift  exchange  in  the  Western  Pacific,  the  Chinese  examination  

system,  a  short  history  of  the  vacation.    No  other  book  in  the  literature  on  social  

justice  has  even  begun  to  approach  this.      Although  Walzer  claims  that  his  method  of  

doing  political  philosophy  is  to  “interpret  to  one’s  fellow  citizens  the  world  of  

meanings  that  we  share”  (Walzer  1983  :  xiv),  he  does  not  confine  himself  to  

examining  only  ‘our’  social  practices:    he  applies  this  interpretive  technique  to  a  

number  of  social  practices,  to  illustrate  the  meaning  embedded  in  them  for  the  

people  engaged  in  them.    

  The  core  ideas  of  Spheres  of  Justice  were  formulated  in  a  series  of  lectures  

given  at  Harvard,  co-­‐taught  with  Robert  Nozick,  in  which  each  gave  a  lecture  and  

then  the  other  responded  to  the  previous  person’s  lecture  and  articulated  their  own  

conception.    It  was  conceived  as  a  particular  defense  of  egalitarian  and  welfare  state  

practices  against  a  libertarian  alternative.      Indeed,  throughout  his  career,  Walzer  

was  politically  active,  and  saw  himself  as  a  democratic  socialist.    This  left  of  center  

positioning  isn’t  headlined  in  the  book,  but  a  large  part  of  it  is  a  defense  of  the  

welfare  state,  and  includes  a  discussion  of  education  (defense  of  the  public  school)  

and,  in  the  power  chapter,  where  he  discusses  Pullman,  a  defense  of  worker  

democracy.    

  These  discussions  operate  within  an  overarching  egalitarian  theory,  which    

focuses  on  domestic  justice  or  the  justice  of  particular  states  towards  their  members  

(in  contrast  to  justice  between  states).    In  Walzer’s  view,  human  beings  have  a  

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capacity  to  create  justice,  to  establish  and  maintain  rules,  practices  and  institutions  

of  justice  that  are  specific  to  their  particular  communities;  and,  by  ‘community’,  

Walzer  means  the  territorial  states  in  which  people  live.    In  contrast  to  the  

universalist  aspirations  implicit  in  the  Rawlsian  original  position  or  utilitarian  

modes  of  reasoning,  Walzer  emphasizes  that  we  can  expect  human  societies  to  

develop  and  endorse  different  ideas  of  the  good  life,  different  principles  and  

different  institutions  and  organizational  rules.    In  his  view,  “every  substantive  

account  of  distributive  justice  is  a  local  account.”  (Walzer  1983:  314).  These  will  

vary  from  community  to  community  and  so  it  is  important  in  analyzing  justice  to  

unearth  the  shared  understandings  that  they  represent.  As  Walzer  emphasizes,  

“Justice  is  rooted  in  the  distinct  understandings  of  places,  honors,  jobs,  things  of  all  

sorts,  that  constitute  a  distinct  way  of  life.”(Walzer  1983:  314).  Communities,  on  this  

view,  embody  richly  articulated  ethical  cultures.    Their  modes  of  life  and  patterns  of  

behaviour  reflect  a  “substantive  life”  that  is,  or  ought  to  be,  representative  of  the  

shared  understanding  of  the  members  of  that  community.  (Walzer  1983:  313).    

Walzer’s  theory  is  pluralist  not  only  in  endorsing  a  number  of  different  

ethical  communities,  but  because  he  thinks  that  there  a  number  of  different  goods  

valued  in  different  spheres  (within  particular  communities);  and  these  different  

goods  have  their  own  internal  logic  of  distribution.      This  is  at  the  heart  of  Walzer’s  

endorsement  of  ‘complex  equality’  and  the  related  idea  of  separate  spheres.    Against  

libertarian  and  post-­‐modernist  critiques,  Walzer  seeks  to  rescue  the  principle  of  

equality  by  dissociating  it  from  ideas  of  ‘sameness’  and  uniformity,  which  are  

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connected  to  the  idea  of    “simple  equality”.  Simple  equality  is  identified  with  a  single  

principle  which  is  formulated  in  general  terms  and  applied  as  a  kind  of  master  

principle  to  obtain  a  just  (egalitarian)  distribution.      Theories  of  this  type  are  

addressed  to  the  “equality  of  what?”  question  and  often  end  up  balancing  equality  

with  other  considerations,  such  as  liberty  or  efficiency.    Walzer  defends  equality  by  

articulating  a  more  convincing  conception,  which  he  calls  complex  equality,  which  

both  reflects  the  normative  core  of  why  equality  matters  and  is  faithful  to  the  

complex,  plural  normative  understandings  of  different  goods.      

This  normative  ideal  has  two  different  elements:    (1)  the  idea  of  goods  

internal  to  distinct  spheres  of  distribution;  and  (2)  the  idea  of  separation  of  spheres,  

with  the  implicit  ideal  of  non-­‐dominance.      I  will  take  these  in  order.    In  Walzer’s  

view,  there  are  a  number  of  different  spheres  of  life,  and  it  is  possible  to  discern  the  

good  or  goods  internal  to  (and  relative  to)  the  different  spheres.  Each  social  good  or  

set  of  social  goods  has  a  criterion  or  criteria  of  distribution  internal  to  it,  which  is  

derived  from  the  social  meaning  of  the  good.      Equality  is  achieved  not  by  equalizing  

some  particular  good,  but  in  an  overall  sense,  through  diverse  distributive  

principles  applied  in  different  spheres  of  life,  which  are  not  necessarily  egalitarian  

themselves,  but  which  we  can  think  of  as  achieving  equality  overall.    For  example,  

we  can  think  of  medical  care  as  a  sphere  of  life;  the  good  that  is  internal  to  it  is  that  

of  health;  and  the  appropriate  distributive  principle  is  the  principle  of  ‘need’.    

Distribution  of  need  is  different  in  the  case  of  health  care  than  other  (needed)  

things,  since  it  reflects  the  idea  of  health,  which  in  turn  is  a  somewhat  elastic  

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concept:  a  healthy  eighty  year  old  is  different  from  a  healthy  twenty  year  old.        

In  the  economic  sphere,  ‘need’  is  not  an  appropriate  distributive  principle.    

As  Walzer  writes,  “It  would…  be  odd  to  ask  a  search  committee  looking  for  a  

hospital  director  to  make  its  choice  on  the  basis  of  the  needs  of  the  

candidates”.(Walzer  1983:  25).  The  appropriate  distributive  principle  in  this  and  

other  cases  can  be  determined  by  analyzing  the  meaning  and  kind  of  social  good  

that  is  central  or  operative  in  the  sphere  under  consideration.      

To  take  another  example:    political  power  is  a  sphere  of  life  that  is  governed  

by  the  idea  of  equality  of  status  in  the  sense  that  no  person  has  the  natural  authority  

to  rule  over  another.    Hence,  Walzer  argues,  the  appropriate  principles  of  

distribution  are  principles  of  equal  citizenship  and  the  capacity  to  persuade.  

It  might  be  thought  that,  since  Walzer  has  not  identified  a  metric  that  can  be  

employed  to  equalize  x  across  different  people’s  lives,  equality  has  dropped  out  of  

the  picture:    as  described  so  far,  he  has  simply  articulated  a  range  of  different  goods  

which  have  to  be  analyzed  in  accordance  with  the  internal  normative  logic  of  the  

sphere  of  life  in  which  they  operate.      It  is  possible  that  equality  is  not  the  

appropriate  distributive  principle  in  many  or  indeed  any  of  the  spheres.    How  then  

can  his  account  be  egalitarian?    The  answer  is  that  Walzer  believes  that  the  basic  

normative  concern  of  most  people  who  defend  equality  is  concern  with  the  status  of  

their  relations  with  others:    concern  that  their  social  relations  should  be  marked  by  

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the  belief  in  the  moral  equality  of  persons  in  the  society;  the  idea  that  everyone  is  

fundamentally  the  equal  of  anyone  else;  and  not  marred  by  relations  of  domination  

and  subordination,  or  based  on  views  of  the  inherent  superiority  of  some  people  

over  others.    As  Walzer  argues,  in  a  society  characterized  by  complex  equality,  in  

which  people  stand  in  different  relations  with  one  another,  there  is  no  “bowing  and  

scraping”(Walzer  1983:  xii);  people  are  viewed  as  having  equal  moral  worth.    While  

there  may  be  different  distributive  principles  in  different  spheres,  the  overall  effect  

is  to  support  a  society  based  on  social  relations  of  equality,  and  on  a  fundamental  

belief  in  the  moral  equality  of  its  members.    

It  is  important  to  Walzer’s  conception  of  complex  equality  that  the  autonomy  

of  spheres  is  maintained.  While  different  people  in  a  society  characterized  by  

complex  equality  may  be  differently  related  in  different  spheres,  and  receive  

different  distributions  of  different  social  goods,  their  relations  with  each  other  can  

be  characterized  as  broadly  equal  because  they  cannot  convert  advantages  from  one  

sphere  to  another.    As  Walzer  writes,    

“In  formal  terms  complex  equality  means  that  no  citizen’s  standing  in  one  sphere  or  
with  regard  to  one  social  good  an  be  undercut  by  his  standing  in  some  other  sphere,  
with  regard  to  some  other  good.  Thus,  citizen  X  may  be  chosen  over  citizen  Y  for  
political  office  and  then  the  two  of  them  will  be  unequal  in  the  sphere  of  politics.  But  
they  will  not  be  unequal  generally  so  long  as  X’s  office  gives  him  no  advantages  over  
Y  in  any  other  sphere  –  superior  medical  care,  access  to  better  schools  for  his  
children,  entrepreneurial  opportunities,  and  so  on.”(Walzer  1983:  19)  
 
On  this  view,  the  idea  of  equality,  when  applied  to  a  society  as  a  whole  (rather  than  a  

particular  good  in  society),  does  not  require  us  to  equalize  the  distribution  of  any  

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one  good.    The  term  ‘equality’  applies  to  the  society  as  a  whole  when  it  is  organized  

such  that  there  are  a  number  of  different  principles  of  distribution  and  different  

spheres  of  life,  each  with  goods  relative  to  the  particular  sphere.  The  state  has  a  role  

to  play  in  ensuring  the  ‘autonomy  of  spheres’  by  blocking  exchanges  that  involve  

applying  the  principle  of  distribution  of  one  sphere  to  another,  but  should  otherwise  

allow  different  (appropriate)  distributive  principles  to  govern  different  spheres  of  

life.    On  his  view,  the  principal  threat  to  an  egalitarian  society  is  the  overweening  

influence  of  money  which  threatens  to  subvert  the  internal  logic  of  each  sphere:    

wealth  and  income  should  not  be  able  to  determine  who  has  political  power;  goods  

such  as  health  care  or  education  should  be  distributed  according  to  the  principles  

that  make  sense,  on  an  analysis  of  the  social  meaning  of  the  goods  internal  to  the  

sphere,  rather  than  in  accordance  with  who  has  more  money.    Although  Walzer’s  

examples  run  together  a  number  of  different  reasons  why  we  might  want  to  block  

certain  kinds  of  transactions,  (Waldron  1995:  144-­‐70  ;  Andre  1995:171-­‐196)  the  

basic  idea  in  all  cases  is  that  the  principle  of  distribution  of  each  social  good  should  

be  implicit  in  an  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  the  good  within  the  context  of  the  

society’s  overall  values,  conceptions  and  meanings.    

How  does  the  autonomy  of  spheres  relate  to  the  equality  of  society?    Walzer  

seems  to  think  that  a  society  characterized  by  complex  equality  (by  different  

distributions  of  different  social  goods)  will  place  people  in  relations  of  social  

equality,  where  relations  are  characterized,  not  by  domination  and  subordination,  

but  by  the  principle  that  each  person  is  a  moral  equal  of  any  other.    This  poses  the  

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question  whether  the  relationship  between  separation  of  spheres  and  equality  is  an  

empirical  (sociological)  claim  about  the  tendencies  inherent  in  a  society  that  

functions  in  this  way,  or  a  normative  claim.      

  There  is  a  problem  with  viewing  the  relationship  between  separation  of  

spheres  and  equality  as  a  purely  empirical  or  sociological  matter.    It  is  possible  (not  

just  logically  possible,  but  perhaps  even  likely)  that  the  same  characteristics    –  good  

memory,  good  analytical  skills,  self-­‐discipline,  ability  to  work  to  a  deadline  -­‐  that  

facilitates  success  in  one  sphere  of  life      -­‐-­‐  let’s  say,  education  –  may  also  lead  their  

possessors  to  succeed  in  other  walks  of  life.      Merely  requiring  that  distribution  be  

according  to  principles  internal  to  each  sphere  may  not,  as  a  matter  of  empirical  fact,  

lead  to  a  society  in  which  people  have  roughly  equal  life  chances,  or  lead  to  multiple  

unrelated  hierarchies  in  which  some  people  are  at  the  top  of  some  hierarchies  and  

other  people  are  at  the  top  of  other  hierarchies.    State  action  in  blocking  certain  

kinds  of  exchanges  will  go  some  way  towards  limiting  the  ability  of  the  rich  and  

powerful  to  ensure  access  to  other  kinds  of  good:  they  are  prevented  from  using  

their  money  to  subvert  the  criminal  justice  system,  or  buy  political  office;  but  

blocked  exchanges  will  have  only  limited  effect  on  equalizing  overall  life  chances,  for  

example.      This  suggests  that  Walzer  is  not  focusing  on  an  empirical  relationship  but  

a  normative  one:    that  respecting  the  internal  logic  of  each  sphere  is  a  way  of  

respecting  and  preserving  people’s  basic  status  as  moral  equals,  and  affirming  that  

no  one  is  inherently,  morally  superior  to  another.  This  is  suggested  by  the  word  

‘merely’  in  Walzer’s  key  definition  of  the  principle  of  sphere-­‐separation:    “No  social  

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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”  .(Walzer:  

20).    

Criticisms  of  Spheres  

Walzer’s  vision  of  social  justice  in  Spheres  has  been  the  subject  of  considerable  

debate  and  criticism.  Some  of  the  criticisms  have  focused  on  his  method,  which,  it  

was  claimed,  was  either  too  relativist  or  too  supportive  of  the  status  quo  or  both.    

Other  criticisms  focused  on  specific  parts  of  his  complex  equality  ideal:    the  idea  of  

social  goods  relative  to  spheres;  the  idea  of  separation  of  spheres;  and  the  criticism  

that  his  method  and  sphere-­‐  argument  are  in  serious  tension.    I  will  discuss  these  in  

order,  before  considering  the  impact  of  his  theory.    

  One  initial  negative  reaction  to  Spheres  was  criticism  of  its  apparent  

relativism.    In  Spheres  of  Justice  ,  Walzer  endorsed  what  seemed  to  be  a  relativist  

position  with  respect  to  the  relationship  between  justice  and  particularist    

moralities:        at  one  point,  he  claimed  that  “a  given  society  is  just  if  its  substantive  life  

is  lived  in  a  certain  way  –  that  is  in  a  way  that  is  faithful  to  the  shared  

understandings  of  its  members”  (Walzer  1983:  313).  Subsequently,  and  in  large  

measure  in  response  to  the  storm  of  criticism  of  this  aspect  of  his  theory  (Arneson  

1995:  226-­‐252;  Dworkin  1995:  214-­‐220;  Barry  1991:  9-­‐22;  Bader1995:211-­‐245),  

Walzer    clarified  that  he  accepts  a  basic  minimalist  morality,  characterized  by  

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“prohibitions  on  murder,  deception,  betrayal  and  gross  cruelty”  (Walzer  1987:33-­‐4).  

This  moral  minimalism  involves  toleration  of  diverse  ways  of  life  and  

understandings,  unless  these  ways  of  life  threaten  to  harm  others  (individuals  

inside  the  community,  or  other  peoples).    This  clarification  (or  change  of  position)  

was  developed  in  some  subsequent  articles  and  especially  in  Interpretation  and  

Social  Criticism  (1987),  whose  impact  has  to  be  considered  alongside  Spheres,  since  

it  grew  out  of  Walzer’s  attempt  to  clarify  the  methodological  argument  of  Spheres.  

Although  Walzer  accepts  universal  prohibitions  on  action,  he  also  argues  that  they  

do  not  begin  to  capture  the  richly  textured  moral  life  of  the  members  of  community;  

they  represent  only  constraints  on  local  justice.    As  he  said  in  a  reply  to  a  critical  

commentary  devoted  to  Spheres  of  Justice:    “Murder,  torture  and  slavery  are  

wrongful  features  of  any  distributive  process  -­‐  -­‐  [They]  set  the  basic  parameters  

within  which  distributions  take  place.”  (Walzer  1995:  293)  

Walzer’s  method,  which  places  importance  on  interpreting  communal  

understandings,  was  criticized  by  Susan  Moller  Okin,  a  former  student  of  Walzer’s  at  

Harvard,  in  her  influential  book,  Justice,  Gender  and  the  Family  (1989).          She  

identified  his  theory  as  communitarian  and  thereby  excessively  conservative  (see  

also  Barry  1991;  and  Dworkin  1995).    The  main  point  raised  by  Okin  is  that  most  

communities’  or  cultures’  understanding  of  women  is  profoundly  patriarchal,  so  

that  any  theory  of  morality  or  justice  that  begins  from  an  interpretation  of  

community  understandings  is  at  risk  of  replicating  these  prejudices.      In  

Interpretation  and  Social  Criticism,  Walzer  attempts  to  respond  to  this  charge,  

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mainly  by  trying  to  elucidate  how  the  social  critic  in  fact  operates,  arguing  that  the  

point  is  not  to  accept  the  current  organization  of  power  or  current  practices,  but  to  

examine  beliefs  about  the  practices,  and  examine  whether  our  beliefs  are  in  fact  

coherent  or  well  supported.  This,  Walzer  contends,  can  result  in  quite  radical  

interpretations  of  practices.    It  was  important  for  Walzer  to  refute  the  charge  that  

his  method  is  conservative,  not  only  because  he  himself  saw  the  book  as  a  

contribution  to  a  social  democratic  understanding  of  American  society,  and  as  a  

response  to  libertarianism,  but  also  because,  if  Walzer’s  method  is  fundamentally  

conservative  and  yet  he  does  not  arrive  at  conservative  conclusions,  it  suggests  that  

he  is  cheating  somehow.        At  the  heart  of  Walzer’s  response  to  Okin’s  challenge  is  

the  question  of  the  content  of  social  meanings.    Walzer  questions  whether    women  

and  other  oppressed  groups    really  do  suffer  from  false  consciousness  (he  accepts  

that  they  suffered  from  oppression);  he  thinks  that  women  themselves  did  not,    at  a  

fundamental  level,    share  the  (majority  or  male)  view  that  they  were  necessarily  

inferior,  or  rightly  subordinate.    He  seems  to  have  believed  that  there  are  forms  of  

resistance  that  oppressed  people  employ  against  domination;  and  therefore  that  the  

social  critic  would  have  access  to  their  resistance  and  differing  interpretations.      

Other  criticisms  focus  on  specific  aspects  of  Walzer’s  vision  of  social  justice  

or  complex  equality.  One  line  of  criticism  raises  concerns  about  the  idea  that  there  is  

a  particular  social  good  for  each  sphere.    In  Spheres,  Walzer  seemed  to  suggest  that  

each  sphere  has  a  distinctive  social  good  that  is  discrete  and  in  some  ways  separable  

from  other  spheres,  and  discovered  through    interpretation  of  the  meaning  and  

practices  of  the  society.    This  is  clearly  far  too  simplistic.    As  Amy  Gutmann  (1995:  

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99-­‐119)  pointed  out,  in  many  cases,  there  is  considerable  debate  about  what  exactly  

is  the  appropriate  distributive  principle  even  if  we  have  agreement  on  what  the  

appropriate  good  is.  This  is  not  just  that  we  may  have  more  than  one  likely  

candidate,  but  that  some  normative  principles  seem  to  cut  across  spheres.  For  

example,  the  idea  of  individual  responsibility  is  a  deeply  rooted  idea,  which  may  

have  applications  in  spheres  of  criminal  justice  (or  punishment),  the  economic  

sphere,  welfare  and  so  on.    

It  is  also  sometimes  unclear  what  the  social  meaning  of  a  particular  sphere  is,  

and  /or  what  the  appropriate  distributive  principle  appropriate  to  that  sphere,  

which  is  supposed  to  be  determined  by  analysis  of  social  meaning.    In  the  case  of  

health  care,  for  example,  a  simplistic  view  might  be  that  ‘need’  is  the  operative  

principle,  but  we  might  want  to  qualify  that  to  distinguish  between  responsible  and  

irresponsible  behavior,  leading  to  ill  health,  as  Gutmann’s  point  above  suggests;  and  

there  may  also  be  disagreement  between  those  who  have  a  sufficientarian  

understanding  of  ‘health  care  needs’  and  those  who  do  not.    It  is  also  not  always  

clear  who  ought  to  pay  for  a  particular  good.    Even  if  we  agree  that  the  good  is  to  be  

distributed  according  to  ‘need’,  it  doesn’t  follow  that  we  all  agree  on  who  is  

responsible  to  provide  that  good,  and  the  level  of  social  or  state  responsibility  that  

should  be  undertaken.    

Another  criticism  of  Spheres  concerns  the  tension  between  two  core  ideals  –  

(1)  the  ideal  of  separation  of  spheres,  each  with  its  own  criteria  of  distribution;  and  

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(2)  the  idea  that  the  appropriate  criteria  of  distribution  is  given  by  the  meaning  of  

the  social  good  by  members  of  the  society.    Brian  Barry  has  argued  that  the  latter  

has  the  potential  to  subvert  the  former:  in  his  words,  “If  the  members  of  some  caste,  

race  or  ethnic  group  manage  to  persuade  enough  other  people  in  their  society  that  

their  birth  entitles  them  to  wealth,  power,  education,  spiritual  superiority,  and  

pleasant  occupations,  then  that  is  what  justice  calls  for  in  that  society”  (Barry  1995:  

75).    The  locally  prevailing  ideas  about  justice  may  not  be  consistent  with  the  

separation  of  spheres,  nor  with  a  view  that  social  goods  are  distributed  in  

accordance  with  the  internal  logic  of  the  spheres:    the  conventional  understanding  

might  be  that  goods  should  be  distributed  in  accordance  with  the  view  that  one  

group  or  people  are  entitled  to  rule  over  another.      

Finally,  the  picture  on  which  Walzer  relied,  according  to  which  within  

societies  there  are  shared  meanings  and  agreement  on  distributive  principles,  but,  

at  the  international  level,  there  is  disagreement  about  values  and  distributive  

principles,  has  been  criticized  as  relying  on  a  sharp  and  empirically  false  dichotomy  

between  the  two  .  On  the  one  hand,  existing  political  communities  do  not  in  fact  

have  a  full  consensus  on  domestic  distributive  justice;  and,  on  the  other,  there  is  

some  agreement  at  the  international  level,  on  international  human  rights  norms,  for  

example,  as  well  as  some  convergence  on  institutions,  policies  and  practices,  such  as  

multilateral  lending  institutions  that  support  subsidized  loans  to  the  poor;  

multilateral  treaties  on  natural  resources;  and  regulating  the  use  of  outer  space  and  

the  Antarctica    (Buchanan  2004:  205-­‐6;  Miklós  2009:  109-­‐115).      In  response  to  this  

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criticism,  Walzer  could  reply  that  he  does  not  present  a  dichotomy:    all  he  needs  to  

argue  is  that  there  is  a  significant  difference  between  level  and  range  of  agreement  

at  the  domestic  and  global  levels,  which  is,  in  part,  institutionally  created,  through  

having  agreed-­‐on  procedures  to  make  social  decisions  in  the  state,  and  therefore  a  

preceding  conversation  about  the  facts  and  considerations  that  are  relevant  to  that  

social  choice,  which  is  lacking  at  the  international  level.    

Influence.  

Not  everyone  responded  critically  to  Walzer’s  Spheres  of  Justice,  of  course.    There    

have  been  many  attempts  to  defend  his  work:    most  notable  have  been  Agnafors  

2012;  Miller  1995,  2007a;  Gavison  2014).    There  are  even  more  who  appropriate  

some  part  of  it.      The    influence  of  Spheres  extends  beyond  people  who  seem  to  

follow  directly  its  method  or  apply  the  theory  of  complex  equality  wholesale.    The  

number  of  citations  to  Spheres  is  very  large,  but  there  are  relatively  few  ‘followers’.    

This  suggests  that  Walzer’s  influence  on  the  discipline  has  taken  a  different  form  

than  Rawls’s.    In  Rawls’s  case,  the  central  idea  of  the  original  position  has  been  

appropriated  by  multiple  authors  and  applied  and  argued  about  in  essentially  

Rawlsian  terms.  By  contrast,  Walzer’s  influence  has  been  more  diffuse,  both  across  

debates  and  in  types  of  transmission.    It  is  diffused  across  a  number  of  different  

debates  –  methodological  debates  about  how  to  do  political  theory;  debates  in  ethics  

of  migration;  on  commodification  and  money;  and  on  membership,  goods,  justice  

and  equality.    It  has  also  operated  on  different  levels,  of  which  we  can  distinguish  at  

least  three.    There  is  (1)  a  micro  level,  with  numerous  authors  picking  up  fruitful  

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ideas  or  lines  of  inquiries  or  suggestions,  found  in  Walzer’s  work,  and  appropriating  

them  or  using  them  to  pursue  further  arguments.    There  is  (2)  a  more  general  social  

justice  level,  where  ideas  that  are  central  to  his  understanding  of  social  justice    -­‐-­‐  

such  as  social  goods  relative  to    particular  spheres  or    complex  equality  –  have  been  

appropriated  by  diverse  thinkers,  often  in  quite  different  ways.    (3)  He  has  been  also  

influential  at  a  very  general,  methodological  level,  where  theorists  have  adopted  his  

method  and  style  of  doing  political  theory.      

   

Let  me  illustrate  each  of  these  three  levels  of  influence.    (1)  The  micro  level  

involves  theorists  picking  up  particular  principles  or  particular  suggestive  ideas  in  

Spheres,  which  are  separable  from  the  general  idea  of  the  work  as  a  whole,  and  

pursuing  these  in  directions  that  Walzer  didn’t  anticipate  or  didn’t  do  himself.  For  

example,  in  the  immigration  literature,  Walzer  is  cited  by  almost  everyone  writing  in  

the  area,  most  typically  in  terms  of  his  treatment  of  refugees  and  guest-­‐workers.    

There  is  a  debate  about  the  state’s  duties  toward  asylum-­‐seekers  or  refugees,  but  

almost  all  of  them  begin  with  Walzer’s  position,  where    he  argues  that  there  is  a  duty  

to  admit  people  who  come  seeking  asylum,  but  there  is  some  discretion  about  which  

refugees  to  take,  although  refugees  are  entitled  to  asylum  in  general  (see  Carens  

1992  ;  Seglow  2013;  Altman  and  Wellman  2009).    Walzer’s  views  of  the  obligations  

towards  those  admitted  are  also  widely  cited  and  have  an  almost  hegemonic  status.    

His  position  is  that,  even  if  a  guest-­‐worker  programme  would  be  helpful  to  the  

receiving  society  by  filling  labour  gaps  and  allowing  larger  number  of  people  to  

enter,  and  even  if  advantageous  to  the  migrants  themselves,  because  providing  

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more  of  them  with  opportunities  which  would  improve  their  situation,  it  would  

have  the  (undesirable)  effect  of  creating  two  classes  of  residents,  and  so  entrenching  

inequality,  which  would  be  damaging  for  liberal  democracy  and  for  the  general  

commitment  to  equality  of  status  that  characterizes  these  societies.      In  Walzer’s  

(1983:  59)  view,  “To  the  extent  that  immigrants  who  live  and  work  within  the  

national  community  are  not  recognized  as  members,  they  are  subject  to  nothing  

short  of  ‘tyranny’.    This  is  inextricably  connected  to  his  ideal  that  citizens  should  

stand  in  relations  of  equality  with  one  another;  indeed,  he  argued  that  a  democratic  

community  is  undermined  when  some  of  its  residents  are  subject  to  an  “ever  

present  threat  of  deportation”.  (Walzer  1983:58).  These  thoughts  on  the  

undesirability  of  two  classes  of  residents  –  some  with  full  citizenship  rights,  some  

with  a  lesser  standing  or  fewer  rights  –  have  been  hugely  influential;  the    “hard-­‐on-­‐

the-­‐outside  and  soft-­‐on-­‐the  inside”  view  of  citizenship  is  now  dominant  (Boniak  

2006:  ch1,5,6  ).  

The  influence  of  Walzer’s  work  on  those  writing  on  the  interrelationship  

between  markets  and  democratic  society  is  also  hard  to  over-­‐state.    In  Spheres,  

Walzer  described  an  on-­‐going  struggle  between  markets  and  other  spheres  of  life  

that  are  organized  around  (non-­‐market)  values.    Walzer  pointed  out  that  we  often  

resist  inappropriate  commodification.    Included  in  his  list  of  goods  whose  social  

meaning  requires  that  they  not  be  exchanged  for  money  are:    human  beings,  basic  

liberties,  political  power,  the  right  to  emigrate;  procreation  rights;  criminal  justice;  

love  and  friendship;  and  any  illegal  activities.  Waldron  notes  that  sometimes  –  as  in  

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the  case  of  murder  or  heroin-­‐trafficking  –  the  exchange  is  blocked  because  the  

activity  itself  is  wrong  or  illegal  (which  holds  independently  whether  money  is  

involved  or  not):  sometimes  it’s  that  the  conceptual  meaning  of  the  good  –  love  or  

friendship  –  precludes  exchange  for  money;  and  sometimes  it  is  the  social  meaning  

of  the  good  that  precludes  such  an  exchange.    (See  Waldron  1995:  144-­‐70;  Andre  

1995).  Drawing  on  Walzer’s  general  picture  of  the  power  of  the  market  in  capitalist  

societies  and  the  struggle  to  resist  commercialization  in  domains  that  have  other  

values  or  social  goods,  there  is  now  a  small  industry  of  thinkers  focused  on  ethics  

and  the  market  and  inappropriate  commodification  (Anderson  1993;  Radin  1990;  

Sandel  2012;  Satz  2012;  Lindblom2001;  ).    Sandel  argues  that  the  balance  that  

Walzer  brilliantly  characterized  between  market  and  non-­‐market  goods  is  no  longer  

in  evidence:    many  different  aspects  of  American  society  have  become  

(inappropriately)  penetrated  by  market  norms,  and  inequality  poses  a  serious  

threat  to  human  freedom.    Both  Anderson  and  Satz,  too,  explicitly  draw  on  Walzer’s  

analysis.    Although  Satz  is  critical  of  Walzer’s  analysis  of  the  social  meaning  of  goods,  

focusing  instead  on  the  problem  attached  to  “the  standing  of  the  parties  before,  

during  and  after  the  transaction”  (Satz  2012:  93),  this  emphasis  on    relative  

standing  is  not  far  from  Walzer’s  own  concerns:  it    mirrors  Walzer’s  own  discussion  

of  the  need  for  relative  autonomy  amongst  spheres  in  order  to  achieve    complex  

equality.    

(2)  Beyond  these  theories,  which  pick  up  some  interesting  aspect  of  Walzer’s  

discussion  without  necessarily  buying  into  the  whole  theory,  there  are  others  who  

have  been  influenced  by  central  aspects  of  Walzer’s  discussion  in  Spheres.    Here  we  

  17  
can  think  of  relational  egalitarianism,  which  received  systematic  expression  in  the  

works  of  Scheffler  and  Anderson,  but  which  are  clearly  indebted  to  Walzer’s  earlier  

discussion  of  democratic  equality;  and  Miller’s  ideal  of  social  justice,  which  draws  on  

Walzer’s  idea  of  different  spheres  or  domains  of  justice,  of  goods  relative  to  them,  

which  are  different  for  different  communities.    

Although  in  Spheres,  Walzer  referred  to  democratic  equality,  and  many  

theorists  refer  to  relational  equality,  the  basic  idea  is  the  same:  the  reason  why  we  

care  about  equality  is  because  people  in  a  democratic  society  should  stand  in  

roughly  equal  relations  with  each  other.    Indeed,  in  her  well-­‐known  article  on  

relational  equality,  which  proceeds  as  a  criticism  of  the  rival  luck  egalitarian  

conception  of  equality,  Anderson  claims  to  be  motivated  by  the  concerns  of  the  

politically  oppressed,  by  people  who  are  motivated  by  the  inequalities  that  they  see  

in  their  daily  lives:  inequalities  of  class,  race  and  gender.    Why,  she  asks,  do  these  

count  as  forms  of  oppression?    What  is  the  basic  concern  motivating  these  social  

movements.?    This  concern  to  interpret  currently  political  struggles  is  also  a  marked  

feature  of  Walzer’s  work:  he  is  also  interested  in  equality  and  inequality  to  the  

extent  and  for  the  same  reason  that  ordinary  people  are  concerned  about  inequality.      

The  relational  egalitarian  ideal  draws  on  Walzer’s  earlier  theory  in  

significant  ways.  Against  the  more  abstract  ideal  of  luck  egalitarianism,  which  

attempts  to  be  choice-­‐sensitive  and  endowment-­‐insensitive,  famously  associated  

with  the  works  of  Dworkin  (1981),  Arneson  (2006),  Cohen  (2008)  and  Otskuka  

(2002)  amongst  others,  Elizabeth  Anderson  articulated  a  vision  of  relational  

egalitarianism,  according  to  which  people  in  an  egalitarian  society  should  related  to  

  18  
one  another  as  equals  and  enjoy  the  same  fundamental  status.    And,  harking  back  to  

Walzer,  Anderson  identifies  the  relational  equality  ideal  with  the  requirements  of  

equal  democratic  citizenship.    She  argues  –  like  Walzer  –  that  in  an  egalitarian  

society  –  all  permanent  adult  members  are  equal  citizens,  have  equality  of  rights  

and  duties.    Even  when  there  are  diverse  ways  in  which  they  may  be  unequal,  the  

public  culture  of  the  society  is  one  in  which  all  are  equal  in  status  and  relate  to  one  

another  on  a  footing  of  equality.    Like  Walzer’s  democratic  equality  ideal,  she  

explicitly  grounds  this  ideal  in  the  requirements  of  a  democratic  society;  and,  like  

Walzer,  does  not  extend  the  principle  of  equality  beyond  the  state,  beyond  the  

political  communities  that  we  share  and  in  which  our  relations  with  one  another  

give  us  reason  to  be  concerned  about  equality.    Like  Walzer’s  argument  in  Spheres,  

relational  egalitarians  have  a  pluralist  view  of  the  appropriate  scope  of  distribution,  

they    argue  for  equality  in  the  political  realm  and  a  broadly  sufficientarian  approach  

to  global  distributive  justice  (combined  with  non-­‐exploitation  principles  and  the  

protection  of  human  rights)  (Scheffler  2010;  Anderson  1999).  As  Scheffler  has  

argued,  echoing  some  of  the  concerns  of  Walzer,  in  the  context  of  human  

relationships,  which  primarily  characterize  domestic  justice,  we  have  serious  

concerns  about  the  corrosive  effects  of  inequality  amongst  people  related  together  

in  specific  ways:    “we  believe  that  there  is  something  valuable  about  human  

relationships  that  are,  in  certain  crucial  respects  at  least,  unstructured  by  

differences  of  rank,  power,  or  status”  (Scheffler  2010:  225).  

Some  of  these  themes  are  explored  also  in  David  Miller’s  works,  which  run  

parallel  to  Walzer’s,  particularly  in  its  insistence  on  the  plurality  of  goods  in  society  

  19  
and  the  equality  ideal  implicit  in  democratic  citizenship.    Tracing  the  link  with  

Walzer  is  clearer  in  this  case,  since  he  explicitly  re-­‐interprets  Walzer’s  theory  of  

pluralism  of  goods  in  a  democratic  direction  and  explores  the  implications  of  this  in  

numerous  other  works,  on  nationalism,  social  justice  and  global  justice.  (Miller  

1995,  2007b).  Like  Walzer,  Miller  emphasizes  equality  of  citizenship,  the  basic  idea  

that  in  different  spheres,  different  distributions  may  be  appropriate.    In  solidaristic  

communities  such  as  the  family,  need  may  be  an  appropriate  principle  of  

distribution,  but,  in  the  political  sphere,  equality  of  citizenship,  which  is  conceived  of  

as  a  status,  is  the  most  important.    This  view  of  the  scope  of  the  principle  of  equality  

also  has  impacts  on  the  view  taken  of  global  justice.    Like  Walzer,  Miller  rejects  

global  equality  and  does  so  on  similar  grounds,  namely,  that  there  is  no  cross-­‐

community  metric  of  goods  or  values,  but  rather  different  communities  will  

legitimately  define  and  distribute  goods  in  different  ways.    Because  no  neutral,  

overall  ranking  or  metric  is  available  to  know  when  equality  is  achieved,  simply  

ensuring  that  different  states  have  equal  amounts  of  x  is  not  necessarily  fair  or  just.    

As  with  Walzer,  the  commitment  to  a  pluralism  of  goods  is  used  to  reject  both  a  top-­‐

down  distributive  theory,  and  to  argue  for  the  view  that  within  each  society  there  

needs  to  be  a  conversation  amongst  people  connected  to  the  relative  weight  and  

meaning  of  social  goods;  and  these  are  both  important  in  distinguishing  between  

social  justice  (within  a  society)  and  global  justice.    

(3)  Finally,  Walzer  has  been  very  influential  at  the  macro  level  –  the  level  of  

methodology  and  general  approach  to  political  philosophy.    Prior  to  Walzer’s  

writings,  most  work  in  political  theory  proceeded  either  historically  or  analytically,  

  20  
and  in  the  latter  case,  through  ambitious  theories  of  justice,  like  Nozick’s  and  

Rawls’s.    (Of  course,  at  an  even  earlier  time,  political  philosophy  was  contextually  

situated:    it  was  primarily  a  philosophical  reaction  to  political  events,  so  in  some  

ways  Walzer’s  method  represents  an  invocation  of  an  earlier  tradition.)    In  the  quite  

recent  past  -­‐-­‐    the  last  twenty  years  -­‐-­‐      political  theory  has  moved  away  from  broad  

theories  of  distributive  justice  to  focus  on  more  defined  issues  –  such  as  justice  in  

migration,  just  war  theory,  justice  and  the  environment,  justice  and  children,  justice  

and  health,  multiculturalism  -­‐-­‐  and  in  many  of  these  cases,  they  can  be  explored  in  

the  manner  suggested  by  Walzer,  by  examining  the  goods  at  issue,  and  making  

progress  on  the  issue  in  question  without  presupposing  or  spelling  out  a  full  

philosophical  theory  of  value.    

In  many  cases,  these  issue-­‐based  theories  begin  with  an  example  or  a  case  

drawn  from  real  life  or  from  the  news,  in  a  manner  reminiscent  of  Walzer’s  

approach  to  political  theory.    Sometimes  this  is  a  device  picked  up  from  Walzer  and  

those  influenced  by  him,  and  serves  to  motivate  the  discussion,  but  is  not  integral  to  

the  analysis.    However,  in  other  cases,  it’s  used  to  test  principles,  to  analyse  what  is  

at  stake,  the  goods  involved,  and  the  relevant  stakeholders.    Consider  as  an  example  

Joe  Caren’s  (2000)  argument  on  gender  fairness,  which  proceeds  in  a  way  that  is  

deeply  reminiscent  of  Walzer’s  framework.      Carens  (2000:  102-­‐3)  points  out  that  

there  is  often  a  long  queue  outside    women’s  public  toilets  and  not  outside  men’s,  so  

even  if  there  is  the  same  number  of  toilets  in  men’s  and  women’s  facilities,  this  still  

might  not  be  fair  or    even-­‐handed.    If  the  relevant  good  that  we  seek  to  equalize  is  

waiting  time,  then,  this  might  require  that  more  women’s  toilets  be  built.    In  this  

  21  
example  (and  elsewhere  in  the  book)  Carens  deploys  Walzer’s  method:    although  he  

remains  agnostic  on  the  question  of  relativism  and  the  status  of  these  values,  he  

proceeds    on  the  assumption  that  we  do  not  always  need  an  overall  theory  of  value  

to  resolve  problems  of  disagreement,  but  what  we  do  need  to  do  is  have  a  shared  

conception  of  the  good  that  is  at  stake,    which  in  this  case  is  waiting  time,  and  which  

might  be  different  in  different  situations.    

There  are  two  further  ways  in  which  Walzer’s  method  has  influenced  

contemporary  political  philosophy.    One  bears  on  the  importance  of  empirical  or  

sociological  research  in  thinking  about  justice.    Theorists  like  Swift  (1999)  and  

Miller  (1999)  have  both  argued  that  everyday  beliefs  about  distributive  justice  

ought  to  be  taken  seriously,  and  they’ve  argued  for  this,  not  merely  because  it’s  

clearly  a  constraint  on  what,  politically,  can  be  achieved,  but  because  in  certain  cases  

it  is  part  of  the  content  of  justice.  This  is  particularly  so  if  society  is  committed  to  

democratic  practices  or  has  democratic  procedures  as  a  constituent  part  of  its  

conception  of  a  just  society.    

Finally,  perhaps  one  of  the  most  distinguishing  features  of  Walzer’s  work  is  

its  concern  with  social  power.    The  motivation  behind  the  complex  equality  ideal  

and  the  relative  autonomy  of  spheres  is  a  recognition  that  the  state  is  not  the  only  

source  of  power,  but  there  is  social  power,  which  often  stems  from  economic  

inequality  but  which  is  not  reducible  to  it.        Concern  about  the  corrosive  effects  of  

differential  social  power  distinguishes  Walzer’s  theory  from  some  of  the  ‘grand’  

theories  such  as  advanced  by  Rawls  and  Nozick.      It  is  also  a  feature  of  a  number  of  

contemporary  accounts  since  Walzer,  such  as  the  work  of  Iris  Young  (1990),  Charles  

  22  
Beitz  (2009),  and  Carole  Pateman  and  Charles  Mills  (2007),  all  of  whom  theorize  

justice  and  injustice  within  a  particular  domain  and  in  a  way    that  is  sensitive  to  

various  facets  of  social  power.    Although  it  is  possible  to  trace  some  impact  in  

political  theory    from  Walzer’s  concern  with  social  power,  I  think  on  this  dimension  

his  work  has  been  under-­‐appreciated.      There  are,  as  Armstrong  (2000)  has  noted,    

many  contemporary  theorists    -­‐-­‐  feminists,  social  theorists,  people  who  are  

influenced  by  post-­‐modernist  and  post-­‐structural  critiques  -­‐-­‐    who  share  Walzer’s  

rejection  of  the  value  of  analyzing  equality  in  strictly  distributive  (equality  of  what?)  

terms,    and  have  been  struck  by  the  ways  in  which  power  operates  on  a  field,  within  

structures,  and    pervades  human  relations  (Hayward  1990).    Amongst  these  

theorists,  Walzer  has  been  less  influential  than  he  should  have  been.    Given  the  

degree  of  common  ground,  it  is  striking  how  little  he  is  cited  or  referred  to  amongst  

these  theorists,  probably  because  the  conservative  and  communitarian  charge  

leveled  against  him  by  Susan  Okin  has  stuck  to  some  extent.      But  it  is  a  measure  of    

Walzer’s  insights  on  power  and  domination  that  his  initial  theorizing  on  this  area  is  

now  accepted  by  many  different  people  in  many  different  fields  and  traditions,  even  

though,  in  this  domain  at  least,  there  is  little  evidence  of  direct  influence.    

   

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