Spheres of Justice #12

Chapter 12 is about political power. One of the things that men and women pursue is state power. It is also the means by which all different pursuits, including state power itself, are regulated. Hence the simultaneous requirement that state power be sustained and inhibited – mobilized, divided, checked and balanced. Political power can protect its constituents, but it may also tyrannize them.

Politicians act on our behalf and arguably with our consent. But in most places and times, political rulers function as agents of husbands and fathers, aristocratic families, degree holders, capitalists, or the wealthy. The agents may be tyrants.

Walzer lists several ways that political power may be blocked.

- Sovereignty does not extend to enslavement.

- State officials may not control marriages or interfere in personal and familial relations, including raising children.

- State officials cannot violate shared understanding of guilt and innocence, corrupt the system of criminal justice, use political repression to punish, or employ cruel and unusual punishment.

- State officials cannot sell political power or auction of decisions.

- All subjects/citizens are equal before the law.

- Private property is safe against arbitrary taxation and confiscation.

- State officials cannot control religious practices.

- State officials may legislate a curriculum, but not interfere in actual teaching.

- State officials must guarantee free speech, free press, free assembly.

Power is not a private matter. It has be exercised to be enjoyed, and when exercised, the rest are directed, policed, manipulated, helped, and hurt. Who should hold it? Two possible answers are (1) those who best know how to use it, and (2) those who most immediately experience its effects.

Public offices, paid for from public funds, provide public services. Hence, relocating an office is an exercise of political power over the taxpayers. A private firm is different. Its relations with its customers are more like brief encounters. Requiring a private firm’s relocating be made a public matter would impinge upon the sphere of money and commodities with its attendant freedoms. Marx’s idea that ownership of the means of production should be a public and political matter would also impinge upon the sphere of money and commodities with its attendant freedoms.

Whereas feudal property was founded and sustained on armed force, capitalist property rests upon activities that are intrinsically non-coercive and non-political.

Walzer includes a section about the Pullman Company, which made train-cars, and the “company-town” of Pullman, Illinois. The chapter’s final section is about democracy. It describes the Athenian Lottery and addresses political parties and primaries.

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