It is not a question here of demanding or strenuous work. In that sense of the word, we can work hard in almost any office and at almost any job. I can work hard writing this book, and sometimes do. A task or a cause that seems to us worth the hard work it entails is clearly a good thing. For all our natural laziness, we go looking for it. But hard has another sense--as in "hard winter" and "hard heart" (...) --where it means harsh, unpleasant, cruel, difficult to endure. Thus the account in Exodus of Israel's oppression, "And the Egyptians embittered their lives with hard labor" (1:14). Here the word describes jobs that are like prison sentences, work that people don't look for and wouldn't choose if they had even minimally attractive alternatives. This kind of work is a negative good, and it commonly carries other negative goods in its train: poverty, insecurity, ill health, physical danger, dishonor and degradation. And yet it is socially necessary work; it needs to be done, and that means that someone must be found to do it. (shrink)
There are two questions with regard to money: What can it buy? and, How is it distributed? The two must be taken up in that order, for only after we have described the sphere within which money operates, and the scope of its operations, can we sensibly address its distribution. We must figure out how important money really is. It is best to begin with the naive view, which is also the common view, that money is all-important, the root of (...) all evil, the source of all good. "Money answereth all things," as Ecclesiastes says. According to Marx, it is the universal pander, arranging scandalous couplings between people and goods, breaching every natural, every moral barrier. Marx might have discovered this by looking around in nineteenth-century Europe, but in fact he found it in a book, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, where Timon, digging for buried gold, interrogates his object: Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods. (shrink)
Among soldiers who choose to fight, restraints of various sorts arise easily and, one might say, naturally, the product of mutual respect and recognition. The stories of chivalric knights are for the most part stories, but there can be no doubt that a military code was widely shared in the later Middle Ages and sometimes honored. The code was designed for the convenience of the aristocratic warriors, but it also reflected their sense of themselves as persons of a certain sort, (...) engaged in activities that were freely chosen. Chivalry marked off knights from mere ruffians and bandits and also from peasant soldiers who bore arms as a necessity. I suppose that it survives today: some sense of military honor is still the creed of the professional soldier, the sociological if not the lineal descendent of the feudal knight. But notions of honor and chivalry seem to play only a small part in contemporary combat. In the literature of war, the contrast between "then and now" is commonly made--not very accurately, but with a certain truth, as in this poem by Louis Simpson:1.. (shrink)
Passion is a hidden issue behind or at the heart of, contemporary theoretical debates about nationalism, identity politics and religious fundamentalism. It is not that reason and passion cannot be conceptually distinguished. They are, however, always entangled in practice - and this entanglement itself requires a conceptual account. So it is my ambition to blur the line between reason and passion: to rationalize (some of) the passions and to impassion reason. Passionate intensity has a legitimate place in the social world. (...) This extension of rational legitimacy to the political passions seems to me a useful revision of liberal theory which has been too pre-occupied in recent years with the construction of dispassionate deliberative procedures. It opens the way for better accounts of social connection and conflict and for more explicit and self-conscious answers to the unavoidable political questions: which side are you on? Key Words: conviction • interest • liberalism • passion • politics • Yeats. (shrink)
The essays in this book by a group of leading political theorists assess and develop the central ideas of Michael Walzer's path-breaking Spheres of Justice. Is social justice a radically plural notion, with its principles determined by the different social goods that men and women allocate to one another? Is it possible to prevent the unequal distribution of money and power from distorting the allocation of other goods? If different goods are distributed by different mechanisms, what (if any) kind of (...) social equality is possible? Are there universal principles of justice which apply regardless of context? These and other related questions are pursued in depth by the contributors. -/- The book concludes with an important new essay by Walzer in which he reflects on the positions taken in his original book in the light of the critical appraisals presented here. (shrink)
Elizabeth Bounds and Tyler Roberts press for the inclusion of critical voices that "hegemonic" discourse seems to exclude, but the polarity is less marked than they suggest. The newly assertive voices of minority communities criticize social practices not from some alien cultural perspective, but in the name of such broadly shared American values as equality, inclusion, and freedom. They not only expose the power relations that determine the distribution of social goods, but they also exemplify the practice of social criticism (...) by which the contours of shared understanding are regularly redefined. However, because the incorporation of local values is not an additive process, the elements that constitute the cultural synthesis can never be expected to achieve equal standing, and the success of the synthesis cannot properly be judged by that standard. (shrink)
The morally offensive idea of holy and total war, presented by the Deuteronomic authors as a religious duty, perplexes and disturbs us by its cruelty. We can identify in the biblical texts two different accounts of Israel's conquest of Canaan (one of genocidal total war and one of negotiation and limited war) and can examine the development and interplay of these narratives - and their correlative divergent sets of moral laws. Study of these documents suggests that the notion of (...) holy war was a retrospective invention of the last years of the monarchy. It is closely connected to the Deuteronomic conception of a covenantalkinship community, and it ought to worry political theorists and theologians who find such a community attractive. (shrink)
Philosophers, political theorists, and all readers seriously interested in the possibility of a moral life will find sustenance and inspiration in this book.
The idea of distributive justice presupposes a bounded world within which distributions takes place: a group of people committed to dividing, exchanging, and sharing social goods, first of all among themselves. That world, as I have already argued, is the political community, whose members distribute power to one another and avoid, if they possibly can, sharing it with anyone else. When we think about distributive justice, we think about independent cities or countries capable of arranging their own patterns of division (...) and exchange, justly or unjustly. We assume an established group and a fixed population, and so we miss the first and most important distributive question: How is that group constituted? (shrink)
