Spheres of Justice #6

Chapter 4 is about money and commodities. I preface the following with this. First, it is my summary, Second, there is justification for considering Walzer’s writing sometimes being too sketchy. That’s hard to avoid with a bird’s eye view of times and places and many possible nuances omitted.

Money is the common means of exchange, but there are blocked exchanges in every society, things money can’t buy. Typical are human beings (slavery is not allowed); political power and influence (citizens cannot sell their votes or officials their decisions, bribery is illegal); criminal justice, freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly; marriage and procreation rights; the right to leave the community; exemptions from military service, jury duty, and other forms of communal work; political offices; basic welfare services like police protection and basic education; prizes and honors of many sorts (e.g., Congressional Medal of Honor, Pulitzer Prize, Most Valuable Player in sports); love and friendship; sales considered criminal, e.g. murder, blackmail, some drugs (97-103).

What is the proper sphere of money? What social goods are highly marketable? There have always been some – objects, commodities, services beyond what are communally provided, both staples and luxuries, goods that are beautiful or functional and durable. But we all have different particular needs, tastes, and desires. Money may be redistributed via gifts and sharing, both personal and communal. 

 

Money doesn’t grow on trees. Things can be had only with effort. Effort seems to supply ownership, at least originally. Wanting, making, owning and exchanging hang together. Individuals differ by their successes and failures in the sphere of money and commodities. But market power may spill over its boundaries, turning market power into a kind of tyranny, distorting distributions in other spheres. 

 

The marketplace, when free, awards all in accordance with the contributions we make to our own and others’ well-being (108). 

 

The man or woman who builds a better mousetrap, or opens a restaurant, or teaches on the side, is looking to earn money. Why not? Who wants to serve or satisfy others only for gratitude? It seems only right that an entrepreneur, able to provide goods and services, should reap the rewards he had in mind when he went to work. 

 

“This is, indeed, a kind of “rightness” that the community may see fit to enclose and restrain. The morality of the bazaar belongs in the bazaar. The market is a zone of the city, not the whole of the city. But it is a great mistake, I think, when people worried about the market seek its entire abolition. It is one thing to clear the Temple of traders, quite another to clear the streets” (109).

“The merchant panders to our desires. But so long as he isn’t selling people or votes or political influence, so long as he hasn’t cornered the market in wheat at time of drought, so long as his cars aren’t death traps, his shirts inflammable, this is harmless pandering. He will try, of course, to sell us things we don’t want; he will show us the best side of his goods and conceal their dark side. We will have to be protected against fraud (as he will against theft). But the exchange is in principle a relation of mutual benefit; and neither the money that the merchant makes by this or that consumer, poses any threat to complex equality – not if the spheres of money and commodities is properly bounded” (110).

Successful entrepreneurs might be considered monopolists of wealth. “Simple equality would make this sort of thing impossible, but simple equality cannot be obtained without eliminating buying and selling (and every other sort exchange relation, too” (111).

Walzer criticizes the views of social theorist Andre Gorz, who is very critical of a free market and bourgeois privatization. Gorz wants more collective decisions made by the state (113-15).

Walzer believes the more perfect the market, the smaller inequalities will be. The gross inequalities we see around us derive more from status hierarchies, organization structures, and power relation than the free market (116-17). On the other hand a radically laissez-faire economy would invade other spheres, dominating other distributive processes. He is concerned about powerful business people capturing political power or bending public officials to their will. When money carries with it control, not just goods and services, but of people, then it crosses its bounds into political power (121).

There is also a section on gifts and inheritance. I will skip saying anything about most of it, since it is about two historical societies. Anyway, the topic is where the sphere of money and commodities intersects with the sphere of family and kinship. The latter is the topic of a later chapter.

Next
Previous