WALZER

Josh Cherniss's post here got me thinking about something that Josh doesn't talk about -- Michael Walzer's theory of the "spheres" of goods that have principles of distribution that are independent from one another and also internal to a particular cultural understanding. These spheres are important enough to warrant reference in the title of the book of his that is probably most famous and definitely one of my favorite books in Anglo-American political theory.

In a nutshell, Walzer's theory of goods is that there are a variety of goods in life -- money, membership in the political community, love, authority, work, education, and so on -- and that each of these goods should be understood to be distributed according to different principles. Conversions between goods should be viewed critically. The point is perhaps best understood negatively: if membership were only distributed according to who could pay the most -- say, if there were a citizenship auction every year -- we might think that such a system could be economically efficient, but it would also be monstrous. Consent, birthright, heritage, and political generosity are all principles of the distribution of membership that need to find some sort of place. Similarly, the old saying "can't buy me love" is really true: we are right to call love-for-money by some sort of term that expresses moral disdain (prostitution, for example). It's not that these judgments aren't contestible; surely someone could argue that prostitution should be legalized and money and love freely convertible in that respect. But I would doubt that even legalized prostitution would change a widespread moral intuition that money, by its nature, is not simply convertible into love. You can pay a prostitute, but you can't pay him or her to fall in love with you.

Attentiveness to the difficulties in conversion constitutes a deep insight of Walzer's pluralism. Communities always distribute a wide variety of goods according to a wide variety of principles. Clashes over convertibility are part of what makes up the life of a community. Community life is, in part, a conversation about how to govern the distribution of diverse goods. And since different goods also create different kinds of sub-groupings, there are always multiple and conflicting groups in the life of a community, especially modern communities that span over a nation state. Communities are irreducibly diverse as long as goods are kept diverse. That is at least a partial answer to Josh's concerns that communitarians, by focusing on "communal rights," can have a blindness for diversity within communities. I don't think that Walzer falls prey to that problem -- I'm not sure that Josh wants to say that he does, of course.

In addition, attentiveness to the variety of goods and the different distributional principles that govern them is what constitutes the difference between someone who is empirically and culturally sensitive and someone who is ideological in one direction or another. I really like Josh's description of ideologies:

They’re useful, and are as intellectually unsatisfying [to me at least; not to ideologues] as usefulness demands.

Part of what is "useful" about ideologies is that they provide a single-minded focus on one good and then promise to provide conversion tables for all other goods. Grover Norquist can talk about individual wealth accumulation and basically ignore every other important good except as it relates to wealth accumulation -- political membership (needed to keep the barbaric hordes from taking your stuff, especially the poor barbaric hordes), education (needed to provide productive skills for the individual and for the economy), political authority (needed to police the boundaries of property rights). Don't know what he says about love, but I doubt that it's that interesting. Aside from the obvious arguments one might make about his moral obtuseness, Grover Norquist really does not see anything wrong with comparing progressive taxation to the Holocaust, because the basic good is wealth and everything (the sum total of other goods) is to be understood with reference to the principle that people should be able to keep what they inherit or earn. Any deviation from that principle is moral evil. That's the obscene limit of ideology.