Michael Walzer by J. Toby Reiner

Author:J. Toby Reiner [Reiner, Toby J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Complex Inequality?

In recent years, most of Walzer’s attention has been focused on Jewish political theory, as I discuss in Chapter 7. However, he does from time to time revisit the argument for complex equality. A particularly important later statement of the position is “What Is ‘The Good Society’?” (2009; see also 2005, 2010, 2012c). In this article, Walzer situates the argument for complex equality against the experience of the American and global lefts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so, he reiterates the case for pluralism, arguing that “given the immense variety of human cultures” there is no one good society but many, and that the variety is not something that can be debated in “a marketplace of ideas” but must be acted out and lived in (Walzer 2009: 74–5). The inevitability of social pluralism makes toleration a crucial value, suggesting the need for a “society of societies” in which goodness equates to “a long series of lesser, more local, more particularized ‘societies’” that leave room for plural types of social form – movements, associations, communities, and states – each of which is judged by different criteria and that overlap each other (75–7). This argument transfers the notion of autonomous spheres to international society, with the different forms of community overlapping each other. Walzer claims that the left’s task is to allow for co-existence of a plurality of social forms because, if they can be reworked to encourage people’s deep political involvement as free and equal people, each of these types of society represents “a central part of what goodness is in social and political life” (77–8). The left must tolerate diversity, because freedom and equality lead to variety.

Here Walzer reiterates Nozick’s claim that a simple distributive equality requires constant state coercion, but also repeats his critique of Nozick that suggests that a society of equals is compatible with freedom given the social character of political life. More importantly, Walzer reiterates his commitment to democratic life, holding that the “critical lesson of the communist experiment” is that the “coercive imposition of a single version” is inimical to freedom and equality (78). Walzer concludes that leftism must be committed to political and social activity in which people create their own versions of goodness and sustain them together. This argument is, I think, the reiteration in Dissent’s language of the central claims of Spheres. The argument that overlapping types of society must be judged by their own criteria is the latest version of the meaning-dependence thesis, while the claim that value creation occurs via free and equal activity restates the social-meaning thesis. Taken together, they continue to insist on the central claim of the democratic left that Dissent was established to defend: that an equal society must emerge out of existing norms, while transforming contemporary practices in an egalitarian direction. This means that an equal society will be forged politically and cannot be stipulated with any precision in advance. Dissent’s democratic leftism, then, is a crucial source of Walzer’s indeterminacy about justice.

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