## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Walzer]] - Full Title: Spheres of Justice - Category: #books ## Highlights - The aim of political egalitarianism is a society free from domination. This is the lively hope named by the word equality: no more bowing and scraping, fawning and toadying; no more fearful trembling; no more high-and-mightiness; no more masters, no more slaves. It is not a hope for the elimination of differences; we don’t all have to be the same or have the same amounts of the same things. Men and women are one another’s equals (for all important moral and political purposes) when no one possesses or controls the means of domination. But the means of domination are differently constituted in different societies. Birth and blood, landed wealth, capital, education, divine grace, state power—all these have served at one time or another to enable some people to dominate others. Domination is always mediated by some set of social goods. ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=81)) - My purpose in this book is to describe a society where no social good serves or can serve as a means of domination. I won’t try to describe how we might go about creating such a society. The description is hard enough: egalitarianism without the Procrustean bed; a lively and open egalitarianism that matches not the literal meaning of the word but the richer furnishings of the vision; an egalitarianism that is consistent with liberty. ([Location 89](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=89)) - I shall try to get at what security and welfare, money, office, education, free time, political power, and so on, mean to us; how they figure in our lives; and how we might share, divide, and exchange them if we were free from every sort of domination. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=132)) - For all the complexity of their distributive arrangements, most societies are organized on what we might think of as a social version of the gold standard: one good or one set of goods is dominant and determinative of value in all the spheres of distribution. And that good or set of goods is commonly monopolized, its value upheld by the strength and cohesion of its owners. I call a good dominant if the individuals who have it, because they have it, can command a wide range of other goods. It is monopolized whenever a single man or woman, a monarch in the world of value—or a group of men and women, oligarchs—successfully hold it against all rivals. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=320)) - Physical strength, familial reputation, religious or political office, landed wealth, capital, technical knowledge: each of these, in different historical periods, has been dominant; and each of them has been monopolized by some group of men and women. And then all good things come to those who have the one best thing. Possess that one, and the others come in train. Or, to change the metaphor, a dominant good is converted into another good, into many others, in accordance with what often appears to be a natural process but is in fact magical, a kind of social alchemy. ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=327)) - For we can characterize whole societies in terms of the patterns of conversion that are established within them. Some characterizations are simple: in a capitalist society, capital is dominant and readily converted into prestige and power; in a technocracy, technical knowledge plays the same part. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=333)) - Monopolistic control of a dominant good makes a ruling class, whose members stand atop the distributive system—much as philosophers, claiming to have the wisdom they love, might like to do. But since dominance is always incomplete and monopoly imperfect, the rule of every ruling class is unstable. It is continually challenged by other groups in the name of alternative patterns of conversion. ([Location 337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=337)) - History reveals no single dominant good and no naturally dominant good, but only different kinds of magic and competing bands of magicians. ([Location 344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=344)) - The claim to monopolize a dominant good—when worked up for public purposes—constitutes an ideology. Its standard form is to connect legitimate possession with some set of personal qualities through the medium of a philosophical principle. So aristocracy, or the rule of the best, is the principle of those who lay claim to breeding and intelligence: they are commonly the monopolists of landed wealth and familial reputation. Divine supremacy is the principle of those who claim to know the word of God: they are the monopolists of grace and office. Meritocracy, or the career open to talents, is the principle of those who claim to be talented: they are most often the monopolists of education. Free exchange is the principle of those who are ready, or who tell us they are ready, to put their money at risk: they are the monopolists of movable wealth. These groups—and others, too, similarly marked off by their principles and possessions—compete with one another, struggling for supremacy. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=345)) - Politics is always the most direct path to dominance, and political power (rather than the means of production) is probably the most important, and certainly the most dangerous, good in human history. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=416)) - The critique of dominance and domination points toward an open-ended distributive principle. 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. This is a principle that has probably been reiterated, at one time or another, for every y that has ever been dominant. But it has not often been stated in general terms. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=518)) - For money seeps across all boundaries—this is the primary form of illegal immigration; and just where one ought to try to stop it is a question of expediency as well as of principle. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=562)) - Tyranny is always specific in character: a particular boundary crossing, a particular violation of social meaning. Complex equality requires the defense of boundaries; it works by differentiating goods just as hierarchy works by differentiating people. But we can only talk of a regime of complex equality when there are many boundaries to defend; and what the right number is cannot be specified. There is no right number. Simple equality is easier: one dominant good widely distributed makes an egalitarian society. But complexity is hard: how many goods must be autonomously conceived before the relations they mediate can become the relations of equal men and women? There is no certain answer and hence no ideal regime. But as soon as we start to distinguish meanings and mark out distributive spheres, we are launched on an egalitarian enterprise. ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=665)) - Nevertheless, the political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history, and culture come together (come more closely together here than anywhere else) to produce a collective consciousness. National character, conceived as a fixed and permanent mental set, is obviously a myth; but the sharing of sensibilities and intuitions among the members of a historical community is a fact of life. ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=676)) - A people’s culture is always a joint, even if it isn’t an entirely cooperative, production; and it is always a complex production. The common understanding of particular goods incorporates principles, procedures, conceptions of agency, that the rulers would not choose if they were choosing right now—and so provides the terms of social criticism. The appeal to what I shall call “internal” principled against the usurpations of powerful men and women is the ordinary form of critical discourse. ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=721)) - The idea of distributive justice presupposes a bounded world within which distributions takes place: a group of people committed to dividing, exchanging, and sharing social goods, first of all among themselves. That world, as I have already argued, is the political community, whose members distribute power to one another and avoid, if they possibly can, sharing it with anyone else. When we think about distributive justice, we think about independent cities or countries capable of arranging their own patterns of division and exchange, justly or unjustly. We assume an established group and a fixed population, and so we miss the first and most important distributive question: How is that group constituted? ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=735)) - Men and women without membership anywhere are stateless persons. That condition doesn’t preclude every sort of distributive relation: markets, for example, are commonly open to all comers. But non-members are vulnerable and unprotected in the marketplace. Although they participate freely in the exchange of goods, they have no part in those goods that are shared. They are cut off from the communal provision of security and welfare. Even those aspects of security and welfare that are, like public health, collectively distributed are not guaranteed to non-members: for they have no guaranteed place in the collectivity and are always liable to expulsion. Statelessness is a condition of infinite danger. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=744)) - In a number of ancient languages, Latin among them, strangers and enemies were named by a single word. We have come only slowly, through a long process of trial and error, to distinguish the two and to acknowledge that, in certain circumstances, strangers (but not enemies) might be entitled to our hospitality, assistance, and good will. ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=764)) - To tear down the walls of the state is not, as Sidgwick worriedly suggested, to create a world without walls, but rather to create a thousand petty fortresses. ([Location 888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BSEQMFO&location=888))