Spheres of Justice #2

I continue on Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice.

“Human society is a distributive community. That’s not all it is, but it is importantly that: we come together to share, divide, and exchange. We also come together to make the things that are shared, divided, and exchanged.” The making or work is distributed among us by a division of labor. Judgments about what each has rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, are never easy.

“The idea of distributive justice has as much to do with being and doing as with having, as much to do with production as with consumption, as much to do with identity and status as well as with land, capital, or personnel possessions. Different political arrangements enforce, and different ideologies justify, different distributions of membership, power, honor, ritual eminence, divine grace, kinship and love, knowledge, wealth, physical security, work and leisure, rewards and punishments, and a host of goods more narrowly and materially conceived[.] … And this multiplicity of goods is matched by a multiplicity of distributive procedures, agents, and criteria” (3).

Most societies are and have been organized on one good or a set of goods that is dominant and determines value in all spheres of distribution. He calls a good "dominant" if the individuals who have it, because they have it, can command a wide range of other goods. He calls it "monopolized" when a single person, a monarch, or a group, oligarchs successfully hold it against rivals. In a dictatorship or totalitarian society, the political rulers are dominant and they have prestige and power. In a capitalist society, capital is dominant and readily converted into prestige and power. In earlier centuries, religious authorities or royalty dominated and held prestige and power. For aristocracy, those who lay claim to breeding and intelligence are dominant. For meritocracy, those with talent and education are dominant.

Distribution is what social conflict is all about. Control of the means of production is a distributive struggle. Land and capital can be shared, divided, exchanged and used for prestige and power. Land and capital may be acquired in the marketplace, or via military or political power, religious office, or heredity. Some group of men and women – class, caste, strata, estate, alliance, or social formation – comes to possess a monopoly or near monopoly of some dominant good or a coalition of groups comes to such possession. This dominant good is more or less systematically converted into all sorts of other things – opportunities, powers, wealth, and reputations. Perhaps the ideology that justifies the situation is widely believed to be true. But resentment and resistance are almost as pervasive as belief. There are some people, perhaps many, who believe the situation is unjust, with the dominant group not entitled to its dominance (10-12).

At a societal level simple equality would require continual state intervention to break up or constrain incipient monopolies and to repress new forms of dominance. But then state power itself will become the central object of competitive struggle. Politics is always the most direct path to dominance, and political power is probably the most important, and certainly the most dangerous, good in human history. Hence the need to constrain the agents of constraint, to establish constitutional checks and balances (15).

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