As a theory of distributive justice, complex equality has a somewhat general structure that emerges out of the meaning-dependence and social-meaning theses that are at its heart. Yet Walzer is no armchair philosopher interested in conceptual refinement for its own sake: his interests are always political, focused on particular engagements of pressing concern (Walzer 2007: 306–10; Walzer 2004a). Complex equality emerges out of and intends to apply to the contemporary USA and similar countries. It is, in a way, the theoretical expression of arguments that Walzer had made in piecemeal form for Dissent (see especially the collected essays in Walzer 1980b) and for activists (see especially Walzer 1971a) during and after the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. That is, Walzer developed it from arguments common to what the Dissent circle call the democratic left, and thus reflects an attempt to balance anti-capitalism with anti-communism and to develop a version of socialism that speaks to the American political experience while transcending the inequalities that plague contemporary American society (for accounts of Dissent’s attempt to balance anti-capitalism and anti-communism, see Howe and Coser 1962, Reiner 2013, Reiner 2017a, Isserman 1987: 79–123, Sorin 2012: 103–22, and Wald 1987: 321–34). This is a crucial source of Walzer’s particularism, for Dissent bequeathed to him the view that a viable socialism must “attend the pulse of American experience” (Howe 1982: 327), as well as commitment to democracy, wariness of over-reliance on the state, and fear of left “sectarianism” (Howe and Coser 1962: 15–17; see also Coser 1954, 1958; Howe and Coser 1955).
These influences contribute to Walzer’s pluralism, which is in large part an attempt to ensure an egalitarian society by democratizing social practices such that workplaces, towns, schools, and welfare provision are participatory ventures in which all citizens are empowered as citizen-activists. However, the democratic-left position also modifies the particularism of Walzer’s view in Spheres by drawing inspiration from social-democratic movements in Western European countries such as the UK and Sweden (on Dissent and the British Labour Party, see Isserman 1987: 94, Rustin and Walzer 1965; on Dissent and Sweden, see “Beyond the Welfare State” 1978, 1980). While neither country could be taken as a fully realized social democracy, for American leftists both demonstrate the possibility of reforms to capitalism that would move it in the direction of socialism without falling prey to the authoritarianism of communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. Spherical separation is Walzer’s attempt to combat concentrated power in both market and state so as to socialize democratic processes.
Walzer has continued to refine complex equality over the decades (see especially the important restatements in Walzer 2009 and 2010). This chapter relates Spheres to Walzer’s public-intellectual and more directly political works, considering what a society governed by complex equality might look like, Walzer’s depiction of citizen activism, and how his position relates to liberal theory and practice. In order to understand this relationship, I also explore the context in which Walzer developed his theory and the influence of early generations at Dissent on his work.
Walzer summarizes the picture of complex equality for societies like ours at the end of Spheres. It includes:
[A] decentralized democratic socialism; a strong welfare state run, in part at least, by local and amateur officials; a constrained market; an open and demystified civil service; independent public schools; the sharing of hard work and free time; the protection of religious and familial life; a system of public honoring and dishonoring free from all considerations of rank or class; workers’ control of companies and factories; a politics of parties, movements, meetings, and public debate.
(Walzer 1983: 318; see also Walzer 1980b: 18–19)
A few years later, Walzer wrote a follow-up article, “Justice Here and Now” (1986) that describes his view of what distributive justice in the contemporary United States requires given social meanings. Walzer suggests that the achievement of complex equality has four major requirements. First, we need a shared infrastructure that enlarges the possibilities of private life, and includes transport, parks, communication, and education (Walzer 1986b: 69–71). Second, for those whom the infrastructure cannot enable, there must be provision of welfare (71–4). Third, given the centrality of the career open to talents, there must be equality of opportunity for positions of political and economic power (74–6). While that suggests that Walzer makes his peace with liberal capitalism, the fourth aspect of complex equality – a “strong” democracy that extends from the political to the economic sphere (76–9) – shows that he attempts “to describe a society … different from but also deriving from our own society” (76). Complex equality starts from our social meanings, so equality of opportunity has a place; however, “we would do best to reduce the slope of advantage” (76). More generally, Walzer notes in the introduction to Radical Principles (1980b), the good society looks like Walt Whitman’s great city: “easy in its democratic faith, untouched by the terrors of the twentieth century” (18–19).1
That introduction is an attempt to bring together several of Walzer’s essays on particular political occasions into a coherent perspective. Walzer’s argument is that contemporary politics belies the hopes of any “deep theory,” such as Marxism or liberalism (3–5), and so that social democracy must draw on multiple accounts. This means recognizing real political value in some elements of liberalism, but also insisting that the full vindication of liberal rights is yet to be achieved (6–7). That is, the “deep principles of the Left … have their origins in the pre-liberated world,” as those values “are part of our cultural heritage” (10). Thus, the goal of social democrats must be to ensure that those values – freedom, equality, respect, hard work, loyalty, and property – are more fairly shared (10–11). Socialism is, in a sense, the socialization of liberalism, which renders liberal values more meaningful by ensuring that they are “incorporated within particular forms of social life” (12).
Transition to the new society must, however, be the result of political action, because “American citizens here and now … rightly have the authoritative (but never the final) word” (Walzer 1986b: 80) and must “determine the shape of their common life” (Walzer 1980b: 12). Walzer insists that democracy is crucial to achieving socialism – indeed, that the two are “roughly speaking, the same thing” (17). This means that it is impossible to “describe it in detail or give a theoretical account of the social force that might come together to create it” (18). Rather, Walzer argues, social democracy focuses less on solving political questions and more on improving democratic procedures, because decision-making power is of the essence of an egalitarian and just society (16). In this argument, Walzer anticipates and rehearses his critique of analytic liberalism for seeking to develop authoritative normative principles rather than “provide a persuasive interpretation of democratic citizenship” (Walzer 1986b: 80; see discussion in Chapter 3). Yet complex equality’s relationship with liberalism is vexed. Walzer defines complex equality as a left position but on what he elsewhere calls the “near left” (Walzer 1991a). It draws on both liberalism and socialism, but also departs from both, because no ideology entirely “accounts for our everyday experience” (Walzer 1980b: 4). Following earlier generations on Dissent, Walzer holds that the experience of Soviet and Chinese communism should teach the left that neither equality nor freedom is possible without diversity, and so that the left must be wary of relying too much on state power (Walzer 2009: 78). To understand this point, we must consider Walzer’s debt to Dissent.
Walzer joined Dissent because he admired its espousal of a position in between the liberalism of the American Democratic Party and communism (Walzer 2013b). It was to defend this position that Irving Howe founded Dissent in 1954, at the height of both the Cold War and the “Red Scare” (Howe 1954). The magazine sought to combat both the Stalinism of the American Communist Party and the complacency of much Cold War liberalism, in particular that of fellow New York Intellectual magazine Partisan Review. On Howe’s account, because of its preoccupation with anti-communism, Partisan Review was insufficiently attentive to the threat Joseph McCarthy posed to civil liberties (Howe 1954, Cooney 1986: 270–72, Jumonville 1991: 82, Sorin 2002: 103–4). Dissent’s platform was to “dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States” and “to reassert the libertarian values of the socialist ideal” (“Word” 1954). On this account, Marxism goes wrong when it dismisses the achievements of liberalism as “mere bourgeois” accomplishments (for discussion, Sorin 2002: 205, Graubard 1970, Howe 1970: 12–13). Following it, Walzer holds that equality before the law, rights, and the welfare state are “enormous political achievements” that the left cannot reject entirely (Walzer 1980b: 9). Early Dissentniks bequeathed to Walzer the view that short-term change within the system is compatible with working toward long-range transformation (Howe 1970: 4–5) and that democratic socialism must prioritize “the values of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, and decentralization of economic and political power” (Jumonville 1991: 95, Seligman 1956, 1959).
The importance of these values is that they are central to the lived experience of ordinary Americans (Jumonville 2007: 372). Howe objected to anti-communism in large part for this reason, arguing that, “little of the Communist hunting which filled the headlines had anything to do with what was really troubling Americans” (Howe and Coser 1962: 480). So, Dissent sought to develop a variant of socialism that emerged out of liberal values while transforming capitalist practices. As Howe would later put it, the “critique of Jefferson’s inadequacies is made possible by the adequacy of Jeffersonian principles” (Howe 1977: 25). This argument is an early source of Walzer’s social-meaning thesis, for it suggests that socialism must use American liberal values to try to transform American social practices. Walzer echoes it when he argues that Marxism tends to underestimate “the significance of [liberalism’s] two most important achievements: legal equality and legitimate opposition” (Walzer 1980b: 5). The vision is one of reform, rejecting both revolution and maintenance of the status quo. This means that socialism must be in a dialectical relationship with liberalism, drawing on its values, yet rejecting its tendencies to abstraction and individualism (Howe 1977).
Bearing in mind the social-meaning thesis, it can be no surprise that Walzer draws on liberalism. For it is integral to Walzer’s worldview that all moral and political principles must emerge out of the societies to which they are to apply if they are to have any purchase, and liberalism is the dominant ideology of American society.2 Nowadays, Walzer argues frequently in Dissent that social democrats should seek to work within the Democratic Party while seeking to push it to the left, adopting something like the Sanders position in the 2016 Presidential election. Social democracy acts as a useful corrective to liberalism because it fosters communal identification (Walzer 1990b: 96–7), and “life in a liberal society has been made bearable by the existence of social ties that liberalism does not create and … does not sustain” (letter to Howe cited in Howe 1985: 164). Walzer believes that liberalism tends to leave insufficient room for collective action. This is why he is critical of American liberals for tending to rely too much on Supreme Court rulings to protect rights rather than fostering local political activity to campaign for rights politically (Walzer 1981, 2004a: 90–109).
So, Walzer follows earlier generations on Dissent in taking liberalism to have achieved significant, albeit mixed, results for working and underprivileged people. The most important example of this ambivalence regards the welfare state. Walzer accepts that it is a major improvement to capitalism that has made our society more humane but argues that it does not do enough to enable social participation on the part of its beneficiaries. Walzer’s major statement of this position is “Dissatisfaction in the Welfare State” (Dissent 1968c, revised for Walzer 1980b: 23–53).3 Walzer acknowledges that welfare encourages equal treatment (Walzer 1980b: 17), but complains that it does not do enough to challenge state power or extend the remit of democracy. The problem is that welfare liberalism perceives citizens as free and autonomous in their own right. However, on the socialist account,
[People] live in groups and always find that they have limited choices, and share, without having chosen, social standards. If they are ever to be free to choose new limits and standards, they must do so in some cooperative fashion, arguing among themselves, reaching a common decision. But to do this … they must share political power. Government must be responsive to their concrete wills and not merely (as at present) to their conventionally defined desires.
(37)
In this critique, Walzer ties a defense of democracy to the claim that value is produced socially in a way that anticipates the social-meaning thesis. He complains that the welfare state leaves only “benevolent elites” (17) active. Improving it requires “hollowing out” the state to allow room for functional organizations, such as trade unions, and local units, and so must be concerned with “power right here, on this shop floor … in this city … always won ‘from below’” (49). This means that socialists must commit to political pluralism, replacing top-down state action with multiple layers of power.
Walzer’s critique that the welfare state leaves recipients in a state of dependence echoes across liberal and left positions: figures such as Foucault and Rawls also make it (for example, Rawls 2001: 135–62). Walzer’s account is noteworthy because of his invocation of a “welfare society” in which more people are included in the provision of welfare rather than receiving it passively (Walzer 1986d, 1988d). The problem with welfare liberalism is not so much that it leaves recipients passive as that it induces their passivity. Walzer notes that the welfare state undermines the “strong traditions of communal cooperation and support” on which it rests (Walzer 1980b: 87). As a result, it leads to decline in urban communal life (90; Walzer 1986e), fails to cultivate civic virtue (Walzer 1980b: 54–72), and does not do enough to push back against the “modern selfishness” to which neoconservatives appeal (97–105). Put differently, every community is “in principle a ‘welfare state’” because there “has never been a political community that did not provide, or try to provide, or claim to provide, for the needs of its members” (Walzer 1983: 68; 1986b: 71). However, the American liberal tradition – with its rugged individualism and self-reliance – tends to undermine the sources of self-help in American life. The task for social democrats is to pursue the “intimations of community” that already exist (Walzer 1990b: 105).
This is what the welfare society would do. In it, secondary associations in civil society would be a crucial site of provision so as to balance the power of state and market. Walzer calls for “nationalized distribution” in which the provision of redistributed resources is “socialized” by the involvement of a broad array of citizen groups (Walzer 1988d: 18). The appeal of such groups is that they are “marked by solidarity, responsibility, and performance in public,” and in accord with American commitment to voluntary association (Walzer 1986d: 90–1). Arguments for redistribution in the USA cannot afford to rely heavily on the state because that would conflict with American social meanings (Walzer 1986c; for discussion, Bevir and Reiner 2012: 194–200). Moreover, there is precedent for attempts to socialize American welfare provision – Walzer invokes the 1960 “War on Poverty” as a failed attempt (Walzer 1988d: 23–4). His argument for socialization of welfare provision is thus characteristic of his work in that it attempts to use local ideas to argue for social change.
Walzer’s position emerged out of his engagement with the movement politics of the 1960s. He takes the early stages of the civil-rights movement in the American South as a crucial example of the possibility of movement politics that eschews state power. In 1960, Dissent sent Walzer to North Carolina to report on the sit-ins protesting segregation. He produced three reports (1960a, 1960b, 1960c), in which he argued that the sit-ins were important because of their “commitment to direct mass action” (1960b: 243). The sit-ins revived an older idea of resistance, the characteristic response to oppression prior to the development of revolutionary ideas. Resisters saw themselves as engaged in self-defense against tyranny. Walzer argues that it is worth reviving the notion, because government power creates a need for communal self-defense, yet liberalism has failed to create the level of civic participation required for the task. The civil-rights movement presaged a new politics of small groups seeking to enable limited resistance, with the “passive immobility” of the sit-down the best symbol (1960c: 372). By contrast, revolutionary attempts to reconstruct the state alienate the uncommitted and are unnecessary, for the development of a group politics would prevent the totalizing power that Dissentniks take to threaten freedom and equality (Walzer 1966b, 1968d, Coser 1958, 1974).4
What socialism requires, then, is “steady work” (Howe 1967, Walzer 2010): the long-term, committed, public-spirited activity of bands of citizens searching for particular improvements to particular problems. In Walzer’s theory, this is because “action is the crucial language of moral commitment” (Walzer 1970a: 98). In the 1960s, this belief drew him and Dissent to the New Left, a collection of young activists central to the civil-rights movement, one of the most important elements of which was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Like Walzer, SDS tended to valorize political action and to criticize liberalism for crowding it out. As Walzer puts it, this leads to “a kind of alienated politics” (“State” 1989: 337–8). For the New Left, American democracy was a work in progress, a noble aspiration yet to be fully realized because of lack of citizen involvement beyond voting. In its founding document, the Port Huron Statement, the New Left thus called for “participatory democracy,” emphasizing both civic participation and an attack on corporate power (for discussion, Hayden 2005, Flacks and Lichtenstein 2015, especially chapters by Michael Kazin – Dissent’s editor – and Daniel Geary. For critique of corporate power in Dissent, Seligman 1966; for discussion, Jumonville 1991: 95–6).
As these ideas echoed Dissent’s goals, the magazine took an interest in the New Left and asked Walzer to chair a symposium of young radicals (“Symposium” 1962). However, leading Dissentniks objected to the New Left’s sympathy for anti-colonial revolutionaries, above all Fidel Castro (158–63). Tensions deepened at the Port Huron conference in June 1962, when Dissent contributing editor Michael Harrington objected to both the exclusion of labor groups from the draft statement and to blaming the USA for the Cold War (for discussion, Geary 2015, Sorin 2002: 201–2, O’Neil 2001: 12–14, Harrington 1962: 164–8). Walzer shared the concerns of Dissent’s older generation, because like them he took liberalism’s commitment to formal democratic procedures to be necessary, albeit insufficient, for genuine democracy. In “A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen” (1968), Walzer gave participatory democracy a mixed review, holding that Oscar Wilde’s quip that socialism would take too many evenings is the key criticism of the ideology. Walzer suggests that socialism cannot dispense with representation and that participatory democracy must supplement, not replace, electoral processes (for discussion, Stears 2010: 198, Kazin 2015: 45, Graubard 1970: 227–8).
However, Walzer regretted the failure of Dissent to build bridges with the New Left (Walzer 1980b: 109–85 centers on lessons to be learned). He has since devoted much attention to regenerating movement politics after the New Left’s demise around 1970. Most importantly, he wrote Political Action (1971), a handbook to movement politics, in which he argues that activists should seek a long series of small changes rather than a grand transformation. He follows Howe and Coser in arguing that the ideologically motivated search for systemic change will lead to the “dead end” of sectarianism (Walzer 1971a: 112–15, Howe and Coser 1962: 15–17). Walzer notes that most activists will have multiple commitments and little time, which makes it important for leaders to define issues carefully and be satisfied with partial success (Walzer 1971a: 28–31). This situates Walzer squarely within the evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, socialist camp. However, it is worth noting that he holds that a long series of incremental changes could over time mount up to the sort of systemic change that could be considered revolutionary (Walzer 1980b: 201–23), anticipating Sanders’s notion of a “Political Revolution.” Walzer concludes Political Action on a positive note, holding that participants in citizen movements will have to work long and hard but that they “can carry us forward to a society less oppressive, less unjust, more routinely democratic than the one we have now” (Walzer 1971a: 125).
Reflecting on the New Left some years later, Walzer argues that it was more accurate to talk of a retreat to local activism than of a decline in movement politics (Walzer 1979a). He notes that many former New Leftists now worked for working-class and poor communities, giving members of those communities a sense of power by working for labor and tenants’ associations (see also Eaton and Scharff 1979). This suggests ongoing possibilities for social democracy, even in the age of Reagan. Walzer’s recent work suggests similar cautious optimism today. For example, in “Which Socialism?” (2010), Walzer follows Lewis Coser and Irving Howe’s “Images of Socialism” (1954) in suggesting possibilities for social change via “steady work” even in times that seem to offer few such possibilities. However, Walzer tempers this optimism by reiterating that socialism is a desire to be worked toward, not something the achievement of which is a lively possibility, or even a fully realizable goal.
In some ways, Walzer takes social democracy to be the completion of liberalism, which has remained unfinished because of its tendency toward atomization and separation (Walzer 1984: 58–63). Walzer makes this argument in “Liberalism and the Art of Separation” (1984), an important follow-up article to Spheres. Walzer credits liberalism with redrawing the map of the political world in a pluralist manner by insisting on separation between church and state and between civil society and polity (53). Walzer considers this “art of separation” noteworthy because it makes possible the sphere specificity that his meaning-dependence thesis requires. The art of separation makes possible the existence of a “protected space” for meaningful choice (57–8; for discussion, Orend 2000: 180–2) and so helps to reconcile freedom and equality (58–9). However, because liberalism tends to operate with a formal, rather than a substantive, conception of equality, it is too concerned with enforcing separation between politics and other spheres and insufficiently worried about the power of money (59–61). The problem is that the limited government that liberals insist on makes possible “private government” at work, which is where “the leftist complaint against liberalism properly begins” (59). Social democracy would complete liberalism because it would extend the liberal art of separation to the economic sphere.
This does not mean that Walzer rejects limited government. In concluding Spheres, he argues that, because an overbearing state “makes for the subordination of [all] other companies,” limited government, “like blocked exchange, is one of the crucial means to complex equality” (Walzer 1983: 284). The blocked uses of power are limits on what government may do. However, Walzer insists that social democracy must balance critique of state power with critique of capital more than liberalism tends to do. These positions come together at the crucial site of his advocacy of industrial or workplace democracy (Walzer 1983: 291–303, 1970a: 24–45, 1980b: 273–90, 1986b: 76–9; 2009). Industrial democracy involves the workers in any corporation or factory exercising control over decision-making processes in the workplace, thus involving the divorce of ownership from control. Democratic government thus extends to the workplace. Some colleges and universities, for example, use shared faculty governance, granting all faculty members a vote on important curricular and programming decisions. Walzer argues that workplace democracy is necessary in all organizations larger than a moderate size, invoking the social-democratic principle that “what touches all should be decided by all” (Walzer 1980b: 287). Walzer argues that capitalism is not merely exploitative – at least in large corporations, it verges on involving the establishment of the private government referenced in “Liberalism,” in which managers command, workers obey, and unequal power makes a chimera of equal citizenship (Walzer 1986b: 77–8).
In Walzer’s first major statement of the argument (1970a), he treats strikes and industrial action by analogy with civil disobedience, which is when someone publicly disobeys a law inimical with their conscience and willingly accepts punishment as proof of their civility. Writing in the late 1960s, Walzer’s work takes places against the backdrop of emerging insistence on the legitimacy of civil disobedience on matters of conscience such as the civil-rights movement and protests against American involvement in Vietnam (Dworkin 1977: 184–205, 2011: 317–23, Rawls 1971: 319–43, King 2011; for discussion, Forrester 2014). Walzer invokes civil disobedience to suggest that industrial action must be nonrevolutionary (Walzer 1970a: 24–5). This does not mean it must be nonviolent; indeed, Walzer argues that “virtually any degree of necessary coercion can be defended” (40). It means that disobedience to corporate orders respects the right of business people to own property and profit from commercial enterprises but denies that those rights entail absolute power within the workplace (26–7). Allowing managers to set whatever rules they wish can lead to repression, so democratization is necessary to defending worker dignity (29–30). Walzer argues that corporations are in effect political communities. The crucial point is that “ownership of property always entails governmental powers … Corporate officials who carry out governmental or quasi-governmental functions … must be responsible to the larger community … This means that the state has an interest in the internal politics of the corporation” (32–3). This interest stems from the fact that corporate autocracy makes it impossible for workers and managers to be equal citizens in the larger community because such rule amounts to a form of governance at odds with equal citizenship.
To illustrate, Walzer appeals to the General Motors strike of 1936–1937, arguing that what made it legitimate was the oppressiveness of working conditions: “Corporate officials possessed absolute authority over hiring and firing, the conditions of work, the pace of work, and the rates of pay. They used this power not only to maximize production and profit, but also to maintain the established authority system. In effect, they ran a miniature police state in the factories” (37). Walzer argues that, in nondemocratic conditions, the obligation to obey orders does not hold, insisting that agreeing to work for the corporation does not, morally, confer an obligation to obey any rules it might set, given the absence of benefits incurred (27–30). He concludes that it is impossible to consent to exploitative working practices, so one is not bound to obey the commands of purported law-enforcement officials in firms such as GM (41).
That working practices in the factories prior to 1936 were oppressive is beyond dispute. One trigger of the strike was that hundreds of autoworkers died during a heat wave because of inadequate ventilation in the plant. That working practices in major industries around the world continue to be exploitative is familiar to anyone who reads about working conditions in the factories of Nike, or Gap, or any number of global corporations. However, Walzer does not merely argue for government regulation of working conditions, but that non-democratic decision-making is itself oppressive, and so that regulation does not do enough to foster complex equality. One reason is that regulation leaves its beneficiaries in a position of clientage, rendering them lucky recipients of someone else’s largesse rather than enabling them to become actors capable of seeking their own good together with others. Walzer of course believes state regulation of the workplace is necessary but holds it does not do enough to ensure political equality in the absence of worker voice.
In Walzer’s later arguments for industrial democracy, he emphasizes that his case also rests on the claim that authoritarian rule in the workplace is politically dangerous because it easily slips into domination outside. To illustrate, in both Radical Principles and Spheres, he sketches accounts of the process. The former uses a fictional example involving an entrepreneur whom Walzer calls J.J. who establishes a fictional town, J-town (Walzer 1980b: 279–94). In Spheres, Walzer uses the historical case of railroad entrepreneur George Pullman and the town he created, Pullman, Illinois (Walzer 1983: 295–303). In the stories, the entrepreneur buys land to supplement his enterprise with a city created by his design and belonging to him such that he owns all businesses and rules autocratically. Walzer says of Pullman that, “there was no municipal government … Government was, in [Pullman’s] conception, a property right … singly held and singly exercised. In his town, Pullman was an autocrat. He had a firm sense of how its inhabitants should live, and he never doubted his right to give that sense practical force” (Walzer 1983: 296). Pullman mandated dress and behavior of inhabitants, although not belief. He was benevolent, providing high-quality housing and reasonable rents (297). However, the inhabitants were akin to the guest-workers whom, earlier in Spheres, Walzer had said should be granted paths to participation in democratic politics (56–61; see discussion in Chapter 5). Walzer argues that such an entrepreneur has no right to protest the establishment of democratic institutions, because “political foundation and public service [do] not give a man the right to tyrannize over others” (Walzer 1980b: 283). Ownership of land does not entail the right to decide how people living in the land must live, because local self-government is a right integral to democratic politics (Walzer 1983: 298).
The crux of Walzer’s case is that a helpful analogy can be drawn between power in factories and power in cities. Walzer argues that the issue is “not the existence but the entailments of property,” and holds that spherical separation means that “democracy requires that property should have no political currency” (298). What makes firms like polities is that both are collective endeavors, places “not of rest and intimacy but cooperative action,” such that domination makes for “usurpation … the displacement of collective decision making, by the power of property” (300). The exercise of power in the workplace cannot be considered a property right without denying the humanity of workers (302). This means that there must be industrial democracy, and not merely within the firm but at “national as well as local levels” (300), with a plurality of arrangements enveloping firms within a national structure, the details of which will vary. Walzer seems to have in mind something akin to the former Yugoslavia, or to Catalonia in the 1930s.
Walzer’s argument, then, is that the exercise of power is a political act. If that is so, power should not be distributed to entrepreneurs because they possess property without regard to the meaning and so the appropriate distributive principle of political power. For Walzer, power exists to safeguard a community, so power in the workplace must be arranged for communal benefit, not that of owners and managers. This helps avoid the domination of workers and their reduction to the status of clients or vassals. Walzer’s argument is a core part of his social-democratic critique of liberalism in that it demonstrates his insistence that democracy extend to all parts of social life. Industrial democracy is thus integral to “strong democracy” (Walzer 1986b: 76–9).
Walzer’s argument has been widely criticized (Rustin 1995: 34–5, Barry 1995: 74, Cohen 1986: 465, but cf. Miller 1995b: 204–9, and Swift 1995: 275–80). The most important critic is Robert Mayer, who views Walzer’s argument as falling into the trap of “simple equality” at odds with Walzer’s overall theory, because in treating corporations as though they were political entities, it allows the logic of one sphere, politics, to dominate another, economics (Mayer 2001). Mayer accepts the case for government regulation (252), but insists that it not interfere with the structure of workplace decision-making, as that would constitute interference with property rights. The crux of the issue is whether workplace power is political. Walzer’s critics argue that such power is consensual: by joining an enterprise, workers agree to its decision-making structures (Mayer 2001: 250). Walzer counters that such an argument is not accepted for towns, and that as the danger of oppression and exploitation is present in firms, too, it must be rejected there as well (Walzer 1980b: 285–6). Walzer’s argument thus showcases how social democrats seek to extend the liberal art of separation. As Walzer puts it, liberalism has been hampered by “a false view of civil society, a bad sociology” consisting of “failure of perception … [Liberals] did not ‘see’ individual wealth and corporate power as social forces” (Walzer 1984: 59). Once we see corporate power as a social force, we see that it is political.
In this argument, Walzer demonstrates the influence of the economist Albert Hirschman, another colleague at the Institute. Hirschman’s influence is in helping Walzer “locate the edges and fault lines” of liberalism and see it as a map of the political world that offers particular depictions of political possibility (Rustin 1995: 20, n. 6). Hirschman’s conceptual history of capitalism draws a similar map, in which crucial to capitalism’s rise is its rehabilitation of self-interest as a restraint on the unruly passions of feudalism (Hirschman 2013). Walzer later tells a similar conceptual history (2004a: 110–30).
Walzer’s argument is in line with another social-democratic principle – subsidiarity – in which decisions are made by the least centralized competent authority. This recurs in his invocation of civil society; in other words, a politics of small interest groups, associations, and clubs. Walzer had something like this in mind as early as the 1960s, but it became particularly important in the late 1980s.5 At that time, Eastern European dissidents in the crumbling Soviet states used the notion of civil society to bolster their opposition to communism as upholding a monolithic society without free associations. Inspired by this activism, Walzer devoted considerable attention in the 1990s to theorizing civil society (Walzer 1991b, 1995 ed.), arguing in 1993 that it had become one of the major growth areas in political theory after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (Walzer 1993c). This illustrates the extent to which, because of Walzer’s public-intellectual work and activism, his finger is on the pulse of political developments, which frequently enables him to find fruitful lines of research that other political theorists take up later.6
Walzer defines civil society as “the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks – formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology – that fills this space … unions, churches, political parties and movements, cooperatives, neighborhoods, schools of thought, societies for promoting or preventing this and that” (Walzer 1991b: 294). He insists that the central task of the post-Soviet states was rebuilding civil society, because that would involve citizens in long closed-off political processes (293). Focusing on a vibrant civil society is also crucial to enhancing political life in liberal-democratic states in Western Europe and, especially, North America, because of decline in associational activity and communal life (Walzer 1990b: 105–11). As a realm of freedom, defined collectively, civil society is a crucial corrective to both the individualistic freedom of the market and the coercion of the state. As the Scottish Enlightenment writers were the first to invoke the notion, it is more appealing to liberal audiences than is state planning (Walzer 1991b: 294).
Put differently, civil society encourages cooperation, which makes it appealing to a social democrat wary of the calculation of market capitalism (Walzer 1986b: 80). Civil society helps Walzer advance a pluralist, anti-statist egalitarianism. The benefit of associational activity is not merely that it makes for better politics, but also that it diminishes the loneliness, isolation, and atomism of liberal individualism. Walzer argues that the well-developed contemporary self is, like modern society, complex and multifaceted, belonging to a plethora of interlocking and overlapping groups, clubs, and movements (Walzer 1994a: 85–103, 2009, 2010). However, there is in fact diminution in involvement in social groups. The result is that liberal citizens are relatively isolated: “we probably know one another less well, and with less assurance than people once did … We are more often alone than people once were, being without neighbors we can count on, relatives who live nearby … or comrades at work or in the movement” (Walzer 1990b: 103). Civil society merits a prominent place in American political theory because of this lack of social and political participation (Walzer 1989).
Walzer’s work on civil society also illuminates his attachment to community. As noted in Chapter 3, the early reception of Spheres often dubbed it “communitarian.” Clearly, part of Walzer’s argument is that liberalisms of left and right – those of Rawls and Nozick, respectively – downplay the role of community in the construction of meaning and identity. The social-meaning thesis in particular suggests that investigation of communities is crucial to theorizing about justice. However, both Walzer and the other so-called communitarian critics of liberalism only rarely applied the label to themselves (see for example Taylor 1989, Sandel 1998). To address this question, in 1990, Walzer wrote “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” an essay with which many students of political theory were introduced to his work. Walzer’s argument is typically ambivalent. He holds that liberalism requires “periodic communitarian correction,” which should aim not to transcend liberalism but rather to “reinforce its internal associative capacities” by bolstering civil-society activity (Walzer 1990b: 112). On Walzer’s view, communitarian critiques are “transient, but certain to return (96). No liberal rebuttal will permanently defeat communitarianism, but no communitarian critique will ever displace liberalism. A recurrent critique that wins “small victories,” then fades away, only to return later, is both useful and inevitable (96; see also Walzer 1971a: 116–19).
The argument runs parallel in certain ways to Walzer’s account of social democracy. Indeed, Walzer suggests that communitarianism should aim at establishing the sort of permanent presence alongside liberalism that, he thinks, social democracy has established. Now, it is important to note that Walzer’s claim is not that communitarianism is identical to social democracy. Indeed, he takes communitarianism to be a corrective to social democracy, too, for the latter is prone to many of the same criticisms as liberalism, as its commitment to economic growth tends to promote “deracinated” social forms (Walzer 1990b: 97). However, the account is characteristic of both Walzer and Dissent in that it aims to establish a dialectical relationship between ideologies, much as Howe had suggested between liberalism and socialism (Howe 1977). I call this relationship an “overlapping dissensus,” in that it seeks to frame political disagreement within shared traditions of understanding (Reiner 2013, cf. Rawls 1993: 133–72).
For Walzer, as for Howe, the inevitability of recurrent critique is due to inconsistency in the critiques of liberalism (Walzer 1990b: 97–101; Howe 1985: 165). One type of communitarianism holds that liberal theory accurately represents social practice today and that liberalism promotes atomized individuals cut off from those around them (Walzer 1990b: 97–9, MacIntyre 1981). Another type argues that liberalism misinterprets our reality and holds that we are more encumbered by social attachments than liberalism suggests (Walzer 1990b: 99–101; Sandel 1998). Walzer insists that each critique is “partly right” but “in a way that undercuts the value of the other” (Walzer 1990b: 97). That is, contemporary society is more isolated, as a result of what Walzer calls the “Four Mobilities”: people change residence (geographic), occupation (social), partner (marital), and allegiance (political) more often than did people in the past (101–5; Walzer 1997a: 103). Liberalism endorses these mobilities, but fails to notice their downside. We can, for example, move down the social scale as easily as up it, while divorce causes unhappiness and loneliness as well as liberation (Walzer 1990a: 101–3).
However, the Four Mobilities do not separate us to the extent that some communitarians suggest, while our commitment to liberty makes permanent curtailment of the Mobilities undesirable. Communitarian critique is an attempt to ameliorate the negative effects of the Mobilities by fostering associational activity. However, given that our dominant values are liberal, communitarians cannot both appeal to social meanings and attempt to overthrow liberalism (111). Community can, given our understandings, only supplement and not replace individual freedom, which is why communitarianism is “doomed … to eternal recurrence” (112). What Walzer advocates is what we might call a liberal communitarianism – akin to liberal nationalism. If this is right, a parallel account of his social democracy could render it liberal socialism.
However, while Walzer takes improving the density of civil-society networks to be a crucial task of social-democratic and communitarian activism, it is important not to mistake free activity as a blueprint for society. In recent decades, one of his most important criticisms of liberal theory is that it misunderstands the nature of human association and both overemphasizes and misunderstands freedom of association. Walzer notes that the most important associations exist prior to choice (Walzer 2004a: 1–20). For example, we are born into families. This means that free associations cannot mean only those that we enter voluntarily. Rather, freedom of association must mean the possibility of breaking involuntary bonds. As Walzer puts it,
[It] is a mistake, and a characteristically liberal mistake, to think that the existing patterns of association are entirely or even largely voluntary and contractual, that is, the product of will alone. In a liberal society, as in every other society, people are born into very important sorts of groups, born with identities, male or female … working class, Catholic or Jewish, black, democrat … Many of their subsequent associations … merely express these underlying identities, which … are not so much chosen as enacted.
(Walzer 1990b: 106)
It is a mistake on this view to downplay the role of socialization and the way in which birth into particular groups structures our identity (Walzer 2004a: 3–4). Moreover, even the available forms of association are culturally determined. For example, the meaning of marriage differs across societies: we can marry the person of our dreams only in societies with the notion of the love match (5–6). Membership in communities is important because it is identity-constitutive, even though it exists prior to choice.
Walzer concludes that political theorists should not try to abstract from attachments, as in Rawls’s hypothetical original position. Rather, they should look for “space for opposition and resistance” within the world of involuntary association, while accepting that most of the time people will prefer to maintain existing ties (12–19). The only plausible freedom of association is limited to enabling people to make unconventional choices. The associations that we choose to enter – those in civil society – are called “secondary” associations for a reason. People choose to enter them only after they already find themselves enmeshed in a complex system of associations to which they did not choose to belong but that structure nonetheless the most intimate parts of their personal identity.
Walzer’s account of freedom of association draws on the social-meaning thesis, suggesting that involuntary ties are morally important because they are or can be identity-constitutive. It rejects attempts to construct maps of the political world that do not refer to the world as it already is. This forms part of Walzer’s critique of liberal idealism and abstraction, which he rejects as a- or anti-political. A recent important example is his critique of deliberative democracy, one of the growth areas in liberal-democratic theory. Deliberative democrats take the heart of democracy to involve “reasoning together” and so make central the values of reciprocity, publicity, and accountability (for example, Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 2004). On Walzer’s account, this overstates the political value of reason at the expense of more directly political virtues such as passion, solidarity, and commitment (Walzer 2004a: 91–2). This crowds out important egalitarian activity by downplaying the moral significance of collective political action. As a result, it undercuts the possibility of creating “effective, organized opposition to the established hierarchies of wealth and power. The political outcome … is readily predictable; the citizens who turned away would lose the fights they … might well need to win” (109). Walzer insists that, contrary to deliberative democracy, the “passionate engagement of large numbers of people is necessary to a democratic politics” (130). A vibrant democracy cannot be modeled on a seminar room. Rather, it requires the organization of the citizen activists for whom Walzer wrote Political Action and in whose pastoral retreat he saw room for local, small-scale successes. Strengthening democracy means helping them to engage in more directly political activities than deliberation: for example, mobilization, demonstration, lobbying, bargaining, campaigning, fundraising, and political education (92–102; for a related account, Young 2002: 53–6).
In other words, Walzer rejects the tendency in much contemporary political theory to construct a detailed account of an ideal decision-making process that is then adapted to the non-ideal world. Rather, he argues, such decisions should be left to the democratic public. Abstraction from the life of that public renders analytic liberalism insufficiently “available for egalitarian appropriation and use” (Walzer 2004a: xii). Following Howe and Coser, Walzer believes that relying on predetermined theory risks falling into the trap of sectarianism by attempting to “force the will of the frustrated sect upon the rhythm of social developments” (Howe and Coser 1962: 31). Of course, without such a theory it is hard to specify with any precision what a socialist society will look like – in the first issue of Dissent, Howe and Coser called socialism “the name of our desire” (Coser and Howe 1954: 122–3). Here, too, Walzer concurs. He does not want American society to become one governed by complex equality unless the public willingly adopts it, holding that the “unavoidable risk of democracy” is that a majority should implement a policy at odds with social meanings (Walzer 1984: 65–6). Political theory cannot, and should not try to, resolve normative debates.
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.
This indeterminacy – and Walzer’s invocation of political action as the crucial mode of left politics – means that his account does not stipulate a form of equality that can be measured demonstratively. This gives grist to the mill of critics, who ask whether the meaning-dependence thesis would not produce complex inequality, with the same people losing out in every sphere (Arneson 1995, Barry 1984, Kateb 2014). Anticipating this in Spheres, Walzer argued that if we cannot forge an egalitarian society from social meanings, we will never know it (Walzer 1983: xiii–xiv). But the critique of egalitarian liberalism discussed in this chapter suggests another answer, which Walzer explores in “Exclusion, Injustice, and the Democratic State” (1993). He argues that the fear of repeated exclusion in every sphere depends on a “myth” based on an overly abstract, “thin” view of people that views all talents as alike (Walzer 1993b: 84). On this conception, we are either “competent and willing across the board” or “a failure everywhere” (91). Walzer considers this an “ideological invention” of the libertarian and neoconservative right7 that, alas, the liberal left is prone to accepting, when in fact the “range of qualities, interests, and capacities is very wide” (91–2). The diversity of talents reflects the complexity of the modern world, which is what makes complex equality possible.
Moreover, the hierarchical view is at odds with democratic practice, which presupposes rough equality of capacity. Walzer calls this the “democratic wager,” and takes it to be a “safe bet,” albeit one that requires concerted political effort (92). The work is twofold. First, it must expose the “increasingly subtle and indirect form” that the convertibility of social goods takes and the domination it engenders (83), based primarily on class, race, ethnicity, and religion (87). One way in which this occurs is via the liberal notion of welfare as relief, which presupposes that excluded people are incompetents who need a safety net (88). Instead, we need the enabling conception of welfare of the welfare society that combats the myth of the hierarchy of talents that welfare liberals absorb from the right. Second, Walzer accepts that the state must play a larger role as agent of distributive justice than he suggested in Spheres, not only defending spherical boundaries but also redrawing boundaries (93; Walzer 1995a). This is because “the existence of an excluded group … means that boundaries have been violated to such a degree that … [the state must] play a part in interpreting the relevant meanings” (Walzer 1993b: 94). The state must intervene in the spheres.
Walzer’s wariness of state action remains, however, as he insists that state action must be enabling and limited so as to respect spherical autonomy (94–5). This means that the state cannot guarantee equality. Indeed, Walzer insists that no guarantees are possible in political life. Yet he does have another answer to the question of how to avoid complex inequality: his theory of social criticism. That is the subject of Chapter 8.