Spheres Of Justice Research Articles

Criticism and Connection: An Interview with Michael Walzer

Criticism and Connection:An Interview with Michael Walzer Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) Michael Walzer is a social critic. For over six decades, he has commented on politics, war, and religion in a score of books and in Dissent magazine, which he has had a hand in editing for a good part of that time. A keyword for Walzer is "connection," and he emphasizes the ways in which people form their values in communities—national, religious, political, and intellectual. This view is sometimes called communitarianism; contrary to the standard theory of liberalism, which stresses the rights of individuals, Walzer focuses instead on the way in which rights are formed within the context of their associations Moreover, justice is decided not in an overarching frame but in different "spheres" and through interpretation. This leaning toward interpretation undergirds Walzer's view of war, and he is known for "just war theory." A student of Irving Howe (the New York Intellectual who founded Dissent in 1953), Walzer began publishing in Dissent as an undergraduate, commenting on communism in Europe and the civil rights movement in the US. Thereafter followed a string of books, on the history of revolution and the possibility of social democracy in The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Harvard UP, 1965); on contemporary politics in Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Harvard UP, 1970), Political Action (Quadrangle, 1971), Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat (Basic, 1980), and The Politics of Ethnicity (co-author; Harvard, 1980); on war in Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (Basic, 1977; 4th ed. 2006); and on political theory in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic, 1983). Walzer's idea of connection grounds his definition of the intellectual, which he elaborates on in Interpretation and Social Criticism (Harvard UP, 1987) and A Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (Basic, 1988); in the latter he asserts that "criticism follows [End Page 371] from connection" and, "if [the critic] were a stranger, really disinterested, it is hard to see why he would involve himself in their affairs." He again looked at revolution in Exodus and Revolution (Basic, 1985), and continued commenting on contemporary politics in What It Means to Be an American (Marsilio, 1992), Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (U of Notre Dame P, 1994), Toward a Global Civil Society (ed.; Berghahn, 1995), On Toleration (Yale UP, 1997), and Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale UP, 2004). In the past decade, Arguing about War (Yale UP, 2004) and Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (ed. with Nicolaus Mills; U of Pennsylvania P, 2009) apply his ideas about just war to US interventions. On interpretation, he has particularly looked to the Jewish tradition, and he has had a hand in compiling The Jewish Political Tradition (co-ed.; Yale UP; vol. 1, 2000; vol. 2, 2003), and Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism (ed.; Princeton UP, 2006). 50 Years of Dissent (co-ed.; Yale UP, 2004) selects key essays from the magazine, and Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory (Yale, 2007) provides a reader of Walzer's own work. There are several books on Walzer, especially his views of war, as well as communitarianism and political philosophy. Born in 1935 in New York, Walzer attended Brandeis (BA, 1956), taking courses with Howe and Lewis Coser, who provided his introduction to the New York Intellectuals. While writing for Dissent, he took his PhD at Harvard (1961). From there, he taught at Princeton and Harvard until being appointed to the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1980, where he is now professor emeritus. This interview took place on 18 November 2011 in Michael Walzer's apartment in lower Manhattan. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and transcribed by Merrill Miller and Jacquie Harris, MA students in the Literary and Cultural Studies program there. Jeffrey J. Williams: To begin, I want to ask how you became a critic. I know you started writing for Dissent as a young man, publishing an...

The externalisation of migration control in the European Union: first steps towards the external dimension of the space of freedom, security and justice

The creation of an area of freedom, security and justice is one of the most rapidly developing aspects of European integration. It this paper, we take a look at the foreign policies involved in this process — aside from the internal development of the European Union, they concern a significant number of third countries, including Russia. In our view, the efforts to manage the flow of migrants and asylum seekers constitute a viable part of the external dimension within the AFSJ policies. Much of this article is based on the theoretical postulates introduced by the scholars of the Paris School, a school within the discipline of security studies that conceptualized the connection between migration, terrorism, asylum, crime and ethnic clashes, and its role as a major threat facing the European Union. Externalization of this complex threat (that is, externalization in relation to the European Union) is thus seen as one of the key prerequisites to advancement of migration management activities beyond the EU (i. e. externalization of migration management). In this article, we analyze the role the EU plays at the international scene and categorize the actions it took to manage the influx of migrants and asylum seekers from the 1980s until the time when supranational administrative bodies were granted mandates in the spheres of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) of the EU Member States. We conclude that it was as early as the 1990-s that the EU launched the policy which later allowed to transfer part of its security concerns to third countries.

Designing spheres of informational justice

J. van den Hoven suggested to analyse privacy from the perspective of informational justice, whereby he referred to the concept of distributive justice presented by M. Walzer in "Spheres of Justice". In "privacy as contextual integrity" Helen Nissenbaum did also point to Walzer's approach of complex equality as well to van den Hoven's concept. In this article I will analyse the challenges of applying Walzer's concept to issues of informational privacy. I will also discuss the possibilities of framing privacy from the point of the "art of separation" by looking at the intersection of information infrastructures and institutions.

EQUALITY, FREEDOM, AND/OR JUSTICE FOR ALL: A RESPONSE TO MARTHA NUSSBAUM

Abstract: This essay is a reply to Martha Nussbaum's “Capabilities and Disabilities.” It endorses Nussbaum's critique of the social‐contract tradition and proposes that it might be productively contrasted with Michael Walzer's critique of John Rawls in Spheres of Justice. It notes that Nussbaum's emphasis on surrogacy and guardianship with regard to people with severe and profound cognitive disabilities poses a challenge to disability studies, insofar as the field tends to emphasize the self‐representation of people with disabilities and to concentrate primarily on the aesthetic and political representation of physical disability. The essay concludes with an account of a recent exchange with Peter Singer on the question of our social expectations of people with Down syndrome.

Just Above the Fray - Interpretive Social Criticism and the Ends of Social Justice

The article lays down the broad strokes of an interpretive approach to social criticism. In developing this approach, the author stresses the importance of both a pluralistic notion of social justice and a rich ideal of personal growth. While objecting to one-dimensional conceptions of social justice centering on legal equality, the author develops the idea of there being multiple "spheres of justice", including the spheres of "care" and "merit". Each of these spheres, he argues, is subject to historical interpretation. He furthers this view by arguing that the social basis for these different spheres is best understood against the canvas of an ideal of self-fulfillment and individuality. Based on the elaboration of these two sets of premises—a pluralistic conception of social justice and a collective ideal of personal self-fulfillment—the article outlines the basis for and challenges inherent to the practice of interpretive social criticism.

Categorizing Groups, Categorizing States: Theorizing Minority Rights in a World of Deep Diversity

Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN's 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe's 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States' 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists.In this context, Michael Walzer's work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer's work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law.One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer's substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer's work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer's state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer's idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate.

Mr Walzer's Neighborhood: The Need for Geographic Particularity in Distributive Ethics

In Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer articulates an approach to distributive ethics based on complex equality that is closely attentive to the specific ways particular communities value goods. A renewed interest in place and geography among practitioners and theoreticians is giving rise to questions that are beyond the scope of Walzer's system and reveal abstractions at the geographic level that undercut his overall approach. This internal inconsistency weakens, but does not ultimately discount, Walzer's overall system of distributive ethics. When calibrated to allow for geographic particularity, Walzer's approach becomes even more useful to critique a range of contemporary development movements.

How does procedural justice shape the desirability of markets?

Past studies of markets show that people oppose the use of markets as allocation procedures when they believe that markets produce distributively unfair or immoral outcomes. This study tests the hypothesis that people also make distinct procedural justice judgments about markets which independently shape their rating of the desirability of using markets. The results indicate that people do make distinct procedural justice judgments and that those judgments are important in shaping their evaluations of market desirability. Further, procedural justice judgments are equally influential in shaping evaluations of market and nonmarket allocation procedures. In contrast to findings linking desirability to issues of distributive fairness or morality, which suggest the desirability of identifying spheres of justice within which markets are acceptable, these findings indicate the importance of designing markets so that they have features that people associate with fair procedures.

Spheres of Justice within Schools: Reflections and Evidence on the Distribution of Educational Goods

This article argues that there are distinct spheres of justice within education and examines a range of justice norms and distribution rules that characterize the daily life of schools and classrooms. Moving from the macro to micro level, we identify the following five areas: the right to education, the allocation of (or selection into) learning places, teaching–learning practices, teachers’ treatment of students, and student evaluations of grade distribution. We discuss the literature on the beliefs by students and teachers about the just distribution of educational goods in these five domains, and on the practices used in the actual allocation of these goods. In line with normative ‘spheres of justice’ arguments in social theory, we conclude that the ideals of social justice within schools vary strongly according to the particular resource to be distributed. Moreover, these ideals often do not correspond with the practices that actually guide resource distribution in education, which may go some way toward explaining explicit or latent conflicts in this sphere.

Der Gerechtigkeit einen ‚Ort geben‘

Abstract The paper is concerned with the role of spatial delineations in Walzer’s theory of distributive justice. The argument put forward here is that Walzer’s concept of the existence of spheres of justice requires socio-spatial and territorial differentiations as a precondition. Walzer himself analyses different socially delineated places of distribution, such as the market (i.e. the economy) or the school (i.e. education). This contribution concentrates on the problem of distribution of political membership, advancing the thesis that we cannot understand Walzer’s approach without giving consideration to his concept of concrete delimited territory. According to Walzer, distributive justice needs the framework of the territorial state, but this entity should not be identified with a centralized, ethnically homogenous nation state: One of the merits of Walzer’s theory of justice is to draw attention to the value of the locale.

Social Inclusion as a Substitute for Equal Treatment as the means for Just Outcomes in Anti-discrimination efforts: A Response to Hugh Collins

Hugh Collins, Social Inclusion: A Better Approach to Equality Issues? advances our understandings of the difficulties of reconciling two measures of equality: equality of treatment, administered on an individual basis, and equality of outcome, administered on a group basis. The problem he poses is a real one in the Western world on both sides of the Atlantic and perhaps far beyond. As he says, this debate plays a important role in liberal democratic legal system because [i]t marks a commitment to eliminate the privileges of status or caste, and to establish a democratic republic of equal citizens. To that end, this debate is of global importances. Major shifts in the elimination of status or caste in world moments such as the last century's end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of the caste system in India, and the nineteenth century's abolition of slavery in the United States have historical lessons about the relative success of these commitments to equality. Like Douglas Rae's book, Equalities, Collins identifies the elusiveness of the concept of equality when used in context. The term, equality responds to different scales of evaluation. Therefore there are equalities (plural) rather than equality (singular). The equalities, for example, include equal treatment, equal opportunity, equal respect, equal result, and equal process. If we utilize equality on a scale of equal treatment, are we also maintaining the scale of equal opportunity? If we utilize equality on a scale of equal treatment, are we also producing equality of distributional result in the target pool? Both Collins' and Rae's assessments agree that the answer is no. It is rare in practice that theoretical ideals of the equality of opportunity converge with the equality of treatment AND with the equality of distributional result in the target pool. When in those rare instances, the measures of equality do converge, we consider ourselves fortunate in achieving justice. When they do not, we engage in a perennial debate about whether one or the other of the equalities is the trump value in being true to the principle and achieving the goal. Within that larger debate, Collins advocates that a social inclusion principle trump equal treatment, but for reasons that I will line out, it's not clear that social inclusion attains that theoretical perfection of convergence between equalities in the several spheres of justice, nor that it produces the just result of the nature that we all yearn for. The problem that social inclusion presents is that it speaks in terms of the intervention of selective counter-privileging as a remedy to the accumulated effects of centuries of unfair privileging. The distributional consequences of this selective meeting privilege with privilege in the name of inclusion hardly undo the past, nor do they de-privilege those who have historically enjoyed its benefits. The distributional consequences of Collins' proposal of selectively privileging the historically disadvantaged are also only selective, rather than given to everyone in the class. In short, Social inclusion sounds great if it means bringing everyone to the table, but if there is not room for everyone at the table, it does not allocate the empty seats in any way we would consider fair, and it does nothing to question the legitimacy of those already seated. Thus, the problem with selective social inclusion to coin a phrase is that it is both under and over-inclusive.

The theory of justice from a hermeneutic perspective

In this article, I argue that Gadamer's hermeneutics of historical tradition does not imply a conservative stance on ethical and political issues. My essay seeks to show that Gadamer's philosophy leaves ample room for normative criticism, objectivity, and theories of justice at odds with conventional common sense. I critically examine Walzer's Spheres of Justice, reading it as an attempt to obtain a normative account of justice based on a hermeneutical framework of interpretation. I make several criticisms of Walzer's method and results, which I use to develop my own critical model for interpreting, criticizing, and revising traditional understandings, and common sense meanings. My conclusion is that we need to extend Gadamer's philosophy, in order to identify the ways that established traditions of understanding and common sense can result from, or produce, inconsistency, irrationality, hermeneutical incoherence, and meaningless deprivations or suffering. This essay thus seeks to develop an influential continental philosophy in a direction that makes fruitful contact with Anglo-American theories of justice, and normativity.

Evaluating Society's "Spheres of Justice": The Israeli Case

Using accumulated knowledge of Israeli social structure and culture, justice research, and a structural approach to social justice judgments, this study examines perceptions of social justice in Israel regarding the distribution of various classes of resources. The analysis yields a set of hypotheses about the degree to which individuals-within and across status groups of ethnicity and gender-favor more differentiating rules in resource distribution over less differentiating rules. Empirical testing is based on a national sample of Jewish students in State junior high schools. Findings revealed that preference for differentiation varies with the resource's degree of particularism (non-convertibility). Despite differences between status groups, an overall uniform pattern was discerned. Findings are discussed from a comparative perspective and on the basis of justice theory.

"Spheres of Justice" in the Israeli Kibbutz and Urban Sectors: Adolescents' Views

AbstractThe current study suggests that, in order to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of the "local" system of distributive justice in the Israeli kibbutz, we need to examine its links to the broader society and its correspondent conceptions of justice. Following the notion of "spheres of justice" and using data gathered in 1986, prior to the accelerated de-communalization of the kibbutz, these dynamics are examined by comparing the social justice judgments of kibbutz and urban adolescents. This comparison unveiled a shared pattern in justice systems in which both kibbutz and urban adolescents favor differentiation of particularistic resources (prestige and power) more strongly than differentiation of universalistic resources (learning opportunities and money). At the same time, the comparison also highlighted the distinctive features of the kibbutz's local justice system of stronger differentiation of prestige, the most particularistic resource, and of economic equality, the most universalistic resource. The kibbutz's distinctive system of distributive justice can be attributed to its communal structure, which has been often characterized by the coexistence of egalitarian and equitarian distributive mechanisms.

Michael Walzer, Industrial Democracy, and Complex Equality

T he most pervasive injustice identified by Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice concerns the distribution of power at work. If complex equality is the standard of distributive justice, Walzer argues, then employees are entitled to select their managers-but this is obviously the experience of the vast majority in our economy today. While the extent of voice accorded to labor does vary significantly in different types of organizations, most businesses (excluding the self-employed) are authoritarian in some degree. Management is chosen by labor, and labor obeys rules and orders in which it has little or no say. Employees are subjects, citizens, and this subordinate status is said to be inconsistent with the democratic ethos of our political culture. An unusual feature of this injustice in the context of Walzer's theory is that it afflicts merely the poor and vulnerable, as do the many other injustices he identifies. Exploitation of guest workers, lack of adequate health care or free time, the imposition of negative goods like dirty work, and so forth are the lot of the disadvantaged in our society, the middle or upper classes.' The injustice of workplace authoritarianism, by contrast, extends across a much broader range of income groups, including many whose circumstances might otherwise be deemed rather comfortable. What is more, this injustice does appear to be recognized by the great majority of its victims. The authoritarianism of managers is a salient political issue today, and while employees do complain about tyrannical abuses of managerial power, most do seem to object to the power itself or to the principle of unequal distribution. Walzer's critics are aware of these peculiarities, and insofar as his argument for industrial democracy has elicited comment from them, it is cited as evidence for the futility of basing social criticism on the shared understandings of a community. According to Michael Rustin, Walzer's arguments about the distribution of power at work are not convincing as logical impli-

In Defence of Pure Pluralism: Two Readings of Walzer's Spheres of Justice

In this article I will argue that there are two theories of distributive justice hidden in Walzer's Spheres of Justice. The first one emphasises the separation of distributive spheres. It tries to formulate distributive criteria by sticking faithfully to sphere‐specificity. I shall refer to this theory as ‘pure pluralism’. The second theory downplays the separation of spheres and emphasises ‘across spheres’ or ‘between spheres’ criteria instead. I shall call this theory ‘mitigated pluralism’. Mitigated pluralism has become popular among Walzer's friendly critics who apparently do not want to charge him with a distributive theory as clear and rigid as pure pluralism. Although I consider myself another friendly critic, I shall argue in favour of pure pluralism.

The sum of my parts

The sum of my parts

The Adjudicating Citizen: On Equal Membership in Waltzer's Theory of Justice

This article presents a reconstruction of Michael Walzer's pluralist theory in Spheres of Justice. It starts by noting that Walzer's main thesis (justice resides in autonomous spheres of social goods, according to principles reflecting each good's social meaning) is too restrictive to clarify his own concern with ‘complex equality’. After analysing the shortcomings of the thesis by reference to medical care and social security, this article proposes an account of ‘justice across spheres’: citizens adjudicate the boundaries of the distributive spheres so as to achieve complex equality, the state in which no one counts as another's social inferior. The citizens are held to be motivated by the desire to create and maintain what Walzer calls the ‘society of equals’. As a result, Walzer's theory is recast in a form that makes it easier to compare his distinctively pluralist approach with the abstract-egalitarian theories of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. The account of ‘justice across spheres’ is also used to explain Walzer's radical institutional recommendations for achieving complex equality in his own society, the United States.

Thinking Normatively About Private Security

institutional conceptions, like political democracy, the market economy, and a free civil society, have a single natural and necessary institutional expression.' (id., p. 7.) 12 id., p. 138. 13 M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (1983) 119-20. 14 See, for example, J. Logan, Private Prisons: Pros and Cons (1990). 15 For a sympathetic overview, see N. Barry, On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism (1986). I say 'more or less related' because as Barry points out (pp. 2-3) many economic liberals defend their propositions on grounds merely of allocative efficiency (and thus implicitly within utilitarianism), rather than seeking explicitly to locate themselves within a normative philosophical framework. 16 For a succinct statement of this position, see J. Buchanan, 'From Private Preferences to Public Philosophy: The Development of Public Choice' in The Economics of Politics, eds. J. Buchanan et al. (1978). 17 It is commonplace within this literature to assert that no 'third way' exists between market (capitalism) and state (socialism). Because both are seen as inadequate, inefficient tools if utilized only partially, 'the result will be worse than if either system had been relied upon consistently.' F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) 31. 18 A. Seldon, Capitalism (1990) 99. 19 M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962) 91. 20 These terms were originally formulated by Albert Hirschman in his Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), though he would I suspect take exception to the ways in which they have been deployed by free market economists. 21 Seldon, op. cit., n. 18, p. 106. Economic liberals generally take an ambivalent bordering on hostile view of (representative) democracy (they have no interest in any other form it might take), peppering their writings with assaults on its practical deficiencies, and resorting to terms such as 'intimidation' and 'manipulation' to describe processes of democratic persuasion. Hayek, for instance, was reluctant to elevate popular sovereignty to the status of principle, believing that it should be judged according to its results (and dispensed with if it threatened the spontaneous liberal order). As he puts it: 'Democracy ... is not an ultimate or absolute value and must be judged by what it will achieve. It is probably the best method for achieving certain ends, but not an end in itself.' F. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960) 106. Seldon takes great pleasure in recasting Abraham Lincoln's famous defence of popular sovereignty in the following terms: 'Government of the busy, by the bossy, for the bully', Seldon, id., p. 111. 22 Though it is a trope of (some) economic liberal writing to recognize that markets are fallible (they disadvantage those who have 'too few pennies', as Seldon quaintly puts it), surprisingly little of their energies are given over to exploring such imperfections or to thinking through how they might be overcome. 23 B. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (1990) 245. 24 Hirschman, op. cit., n. 20, p. 21. 25 Seldon, op. cit., n. 18, p. 105. 26 See, for instance, the discussion in Seldon (id., ch. 8) where he prefers to speak of goods with 'unavoidably collective functions'. 27 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). 28 D. Pyle, Cutting the Costs of Crime: The Economics of Crime and Criminal Justice (1995). 29 id., p. 54. 30 id., p. 61. 31 id. Critics of the commodification of security (and other public services) argue that allowing the wealthy to purchase their own provision residualizes the remaining public service by (among other things) weakening the willingness of those who have 'opted-out' to fund it through general taxation. Economic liberals take the opposite view contending that the competitive threat encourages public services to improve their performance and thereby win back customers. One can't help feeling that this response rather neglects the way in which goods such as private education, health, and security are in liberal democracies such

Spheres of justice: The case of education

Social justice in education has not attracted much attention from sociologists of education. In educational policy, considerations of social justice in the distribution of educational provision have only been accepted as valid arguments when meeting the demands of economic efficiency. Greater attention is currently being drawn to social justice in education as demonstrated by the debate on Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (1983). The argument developed in the present article is that criteria based on social justice should be carefully considered. Such criteria can help clarify the problems of legitimation which are confronting the government in at least the Netherlands and illustrate the need for critical analysis of the actual educational policy of decentralisation and its consequences. Some recent ideas on social justice in education from Dutch sociologists are presented, followed by a short consideration of alternatives to the dominant criterion of achievement in education. The ideas of Walzer (1983) are then discussed in light of a number of insights from the sociology of education.