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Political Theory as Connected Social Criticism

If a contextually bounded political theory is to be convincingly described, an idea of immanent criticism must be unpacked that is grounded in the internal logic of conventional argument while somehow looking beyond it. However difficult, the goal must be to combine the roles of participant and anthropologist in our political culture and thus try to get a critical purchase on our practices that can then be used to generate adequate standards for normative argument about them. This is the project attempted in Spheres of Justice, Interpretation and Social Criticism and other recent writings by Michael Walzer.^[1]

I. Walzer's View: Exposition

Walzer does not so much want to propose a theory as to explore and expose difficulties in the ways we characteristically think and act within our terms of reference. He wants people to look critically at their own practices, or, better, he wants to chronicle and extend patterns of critical argument that already exist. Social criticism, he tells us, "is less the practical offspring of scientific knowledge than the educated cousin of common complaint." It is developed "naturally, as it were, by elaborating on existing moralities and telling stories about a society more just than, though never entirely different from, our own" (Walzer 1987: 65). Social criticism is an immanent activity:

[1] Walzer's arguments are applied by example in The Company of Critics , published as this book was going to press. Although I have added some references to it, I do not discuss it in detail, preferring to rely on his explicitly theoretical statements of his view. This view is not altered or modified in the new account.

"Social" has a pronominal and reflexive function, rather like "self" in "self-criticism," which names subject and object at the same time. No doubt, societies do not criticize themselves; social critics are individuals, but they are also, most of the time, members, speaking in public to other members who join in the speaking and whose speech constitutes a collective reflection upon the conditions of collective life. (Ibid.: 35)

(i) Dominance, Hegemony, and the Inevitability of Social Criticism

For Walzer the need for social criticism is a function of relations of social domination and control and more particularly of the social conflict engendered by such relations. "Most societies," he argues, "are organized on what we might think of as a social version of the gold standard; one good or one set of goods is dominant and determinative of value in all the spheres of distribution." A good becomes dominant, for Walzer, when the fact of owning it confers on the owner "command [of] a wide range of other goods," so that these latter goods become used in ways that are not "limited by their intrinsic meanings." Although dominance can sometimes result from monopoly ownership of an essential good, more typically it is "the work of many hands, mixing reality and symbol." Dominance has historically been based on various social characteristics: physical strength, familial reputation, religious or political office, landed wealth, capital, and technical knowledge (Walzer 1983a: 10–11). It is the presence of dominance that makes social criticism both possible and necessary:

Social criticism must be understood as one of the more important by-products of a larger activity—let us call it the activity of cultural elaboration and affirmation. This is the work of priests and prophets; teachers and sages; storytellers, poets, historians, and writers generally. As soon as these sorts of people exist, the possibility of criticism exists. It is not that they constitute a permanently subversive "new class," or that they are the carriers of an "adversary culture." They carry the common culture; as Marx argues, they do (among other things) the intellectual work of the ruling class. But so long as they do intellectual work, they open the way for the adversary proceeding of social criticism. (Walzer 1987: 40)

Walzer elaborates this in terms of Gramsci's theory of hegemony. What makes criticism a permanent possibility for Walzer is that "every ruling

class is compelled to present itself as a universal class." Every dominant ideology exhibits a "double embodiment" deriving from the need to universalize hegemonic claims:

Trapped in the class struggle, seeking whatever victories are available, the rulers nevertheless claim to stand above the struggle, guardians of the common interest, their goal not victory but transcendence. This self-presentation of the rulers is elaborated by the intellectuals. Their work is apologetic, but the apology is of a sort that gives hostages to future social critics. It sets standards that the rulers will not live up to, cannot live up to, given their particularist ambitions. One might say that these standards themselves embody ruling class interests, but they do so only within a universalist disguise. And they also embody lower-class interests, else the disguise would not be convincing. Ideology strains toward universality as a condition of its success. (Ibid.: 40–41)

This double embodiment in the dominant ideology of beliefs of both ruling and ruled makes criticism possible and inevitable. The "fact of hegemony," as Walzer quotes Gramsci, ensures "that one takes into account the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony will be exercised" and requires "that the hegemonic groups will make some sacrifices of a corporate nature." Because of these sacrifices ruling ideas "internalize contradictions, and so criticism always has a starting point inside the dominant culture." So, for example, if we consider how the idea of equality enshrined in bourgeois ideology becomes hostage to radical criticism, we can see how "upper-class ideology carries within itself dangerous possibilities." Considered in Marxist terms

as the credo of the triumphant middle classes, equality has a distinctly limited meaning. Its reference, among French revolutionaries, say, is to equality before the law, the career open to talents, and so on. It describes (and also conceals) the conditions of the competitive race for wealth and office. Radical critics delight in "exposing" its limits: it guarantees to all men and women, as Anatole France wrote, an equal right to sleep under the bridges of Paris. But the word has larger meanings—it would be less useful if it did not—subordinated within but never eliminated from the ruling ideology. These larger meanings are, to use a Gramscian term, "concessionary" in character; with them or through them the middle classes gesture toward lower-class aspiration. (Ibid.: 41–43)

These gestures are not insincere; if they were "social criticism would have less bite than it does have." But the gestures can nonetheless be invoked by the social critic who "exploits the larger meanings of equality, which are more mocked than mirrored in everyday experience." The resources for social criticism, then, "are always available, because of what a moral world is, because of what we do when we construct it" (ibid.: 43, 46).

To stress that this is not a functionalist view, Walzer points out that "the capacity for criticism always extends beyond the 'needs' of the social structure itself and its dominant groups." Although the moral and the social worlds are more or less coherent, "they are never more than more or less coherent. Morality is always potentially subversive of class and power." This is why "we live anxiously with out ideologies; they are strained and awkward; they do not ring true, and we wait for some angry or indignant neighbor or friend or former friend, the private version of a social critic, to tell us so." Like ancient prophets such as Amos—who exemplifies the social critic at his best for Walzer—effective social critics' work is always immanent. It rests on "the identification of public pronouncements and respectable opinion as hypocritical, the attack upon actual behavior and institutional arrangements, the search for core values (to which hypocrisy is always a clue), the demand for an everyday life in accordance with the core" (ibid.: 21–22, 47, 87). No social good ever achieves perfect dominance, then, and herein lies the basis of social criticism. Because "dominance is always incomplete and monopoly imperfect, the rule of every ruling class is unstable." It is "continually challenged by other groups in the name of alternative patterns of conversion"—conversion, that is, of the resources available to the dominant interest into the basic unit of social value (Walzer 1983a: 11).

It is unfortunate that Dworkin and other critics of Walzer, who fault him for not attempting to supply a consistent general defense of his theory, have paid no attention to this account of immanent criticism of dominant ideologies because it is clearly integral to his project.^[2] An ideology, for Walzer, is a claim to monopolize a dominant good "when worked up for public purposes." Struggles among conflicting ideologies take a "paradigmatic form" in which, Walzer tells us, "I have sought the guiding thread of my own argument." What is this paradigmatic form? Some group—"class, caste, strata, estate, alliance, or social formation"—comes to control a dominant good and to convert it "more or less systematically" until it pervades society.

[2] See Dworkin's "To Each His Own," a review of Spheres of Justice that appeared in the New York Review of Books on April 14, 1983, and a reply by Dworkin to Walzer's response that appeared on July 21, 1983.

So wealth is seized by the strong, honor by the wellborn, office by the well educated. Perhaps the ideology that justifies the seizure is widely believed to be true. But resentment and resistance are (almost) as pervasive as belief. There are always some people, and after a time there are a great many, who think the seizure is not justice but usurpation. The ruling group does not possess, or does not uniquely possess, the qualities it claims; the conversion process violates the common understanding of the goods at stake. Social conflict is intermittent, or it is endemic; at some point, counterclaims are put forward. (Walzer 1983a: 12)

This process has no logical conclusion or outcome; for Walzer there is no dynamic teleology to immanent criticism as there is for Hegel, no process by which social arrangements become progressively more adequate as a result of historical changes. "One group wins, and then a different one; or coalitions are worked out, and supremacy is uneasily shared. There is no final victory, nor should there be" (ibid). To think that there could be is to expect too much from moral and political argument. Critical interpretations can do no more than "set the terms of moral argument"; the argument itself goes on forever, with "only temporary stopping points, moments of judgment" (Walzer 1987: 49). Everyday moral argument takes the form of story telling, and this is preferable to attempts at scientific ethics that will settle things for all time,

better even though there is no last story that, once told, would leave all future storytellers without employment. I understand that this indeterminacy prompts, not without reason, a certain philosophical apprehension. And from this there follows the whole elaborate apparatus of detachment and objectivity, whose purpose is not to facilitate criticism but to guarantee its correctness. The truth is that there is no guarantee, any more than there is a guarantor. Nor is there a society, waiting to be discovered or invented, that would not require our critical stories. (Ibid.: 65–66)

The picture is almost Foucaultian: relations of domination constantly replace and supersede one another but are never abolished.^[3] Social conflict over patterns of conversion is endless, and particular arguments about distributive

[3] This is not to say that Walzer subscribes to Foucault's localist analysis of power, which he has explicitly rejected (1983b: 481–89). Aspects of his discussion of Foucault are taken up below.

justice might best be thought of as provisional solutions from the points of view of particular social groups.

Why take this view of political theory as social criticism? Walzer's defense turns on comparing it with the principal alternatives, the paths of "discovery" and "invention." Those who opt for the path of discovery assume that "morality is a creation; but [that] we are not its creators." Most religious morality and conventional natural law theory are of this kind, but so is much secular political philosophy. Plato, Marx, and the utilitarians were all philosophers of discovery in Walzer's sense. The injunctions of arguments that rest on appeals to discovery are invariably at odds with reality, and herein lies the source of their critical edge. Discovery is "critical from the beginning, for it would hardly be a revelation if God commanded us to do and not do what we were already doing and not doing." Accounts of natural law or natural rights "rarely ring true as descriptions of a new moral world." Indeed, discoverers like Bentham, who evidently believe that they have discovered some eternal facts about the human condition, are often so startled by the degree to which apparent implications of their discoveries depart from the everyday experience that they fiddle with their arguments to yield arguments "closer to what we all think" (Walzer 1987: 4, 19, 6–7). The second possibility, the path of invention, rests on the assumption "that there is no pre-existent design, no divine or natural blueprint to guide us." Not surprisingly, those who have walked this path—Descartes is the paradigm example—begin with questions of method, with a "design of a design procedure." Central to the path of invention is agreement. The work of Descartes's legislator "is very risky unless he is a representative figure, somehow embodying the range of opinions and interests that are in play around him," and it is not surprising in contractarian political theory that inventors from Hobbes to Rawls are concerned with the creation of institutions that can win the assent of all. Assuming the death of God and the meaninglessness of nature, there is no alternative appeal; the task for inventors is to conjure up the moral world "that would have existed if a moral world had existed without their inventing it." It is just because this morality commands assent that we can use it as a standard "against which we can measure any person's life, any society's practices." Morality by invention derives its critical force "from the process by which it was created. If we accept it, it is because we have participated, or can imagine ourselves having participated, in its invention" (ibid.: 10, 12–13).

To exhibit the superiority of the path of interpretation over both these alternatives, Walzer argues that they collapse into it. He advances the metaphor of the three branches of government. Discovery "resembles the work of the executive: to find, proclaim, and then enforce the law." Invention

"is legislative from the beginning." It involves the creation of that which is to be enforced. Interpretation, by contrast, is "the proper work of the judicial branch"; its goal is to get at the meanings of authoritative values, to interpret them in light of existing practice (ibid.: 18–19). Walzer's purpose in invoking the analogy is to establish what it obscures as well as what it reveals. Just as we know that the acts of executive and legislative branches involve interpretation, so too in moral philosophy, whatever path we think we walk, we end up walking his third. Discoverers in moral philosophy can only really discover what they already know. "I do not mean to deny the reality of the experience of stepping back, though I doubt that we can ever step back all the way to nowhere." just as the great majority of legislation involves modification and codification of existing precedent, so the path of invention at least "runs close" to that of interpretation (ibid.: 6–7, 19). As Walzer elaborates,

The claim of interpretation is simply this: that neither discovery nor invention is necessary because we already possess what they pretend to provide. Morality, unlike politics, does not require executive authority or systematic legislation. We do not have to discover the moral world because we have always lived there. We do not have to invent it because it has already been invented—though not in accordance with any philosophical method. No design procedure has governed its design, and the result no doubt is disorganized and uncertain. It is also very dense: the moral world has a lived-in quality, like a home occupied by a single family over many generations, with unplanned additions here and there, and all the available space filled with memory-laden objects and artifacts. The whole thing, taken as a whole, lends itself less to abstract modeling than to thick description. Moral argument in such a setting is interpretive in character, closely resembling the work of a lawyer or judge who struggles to find meaning in a morass of conflicting laws and precedents. (Ibid.: 19–20)

Walzer does not go all the way with the claim that discovery and invention are simply forms of disguised interpretation, but he argues that "the more novel these are, the less likely they are to make for strong or even plausible arguments." Unless they generate results that conform to our everyday moral intuitions—which are "the product of time, accident, external force, political compromise, fallible and particularist intentions"—they are unlikely to be taken seriously (ibid.: 21, 20).

Even if the paths of discovery and invention turn out to be negotiable,

Walzer wants to argue that they are unattractive. Discovery can at best reveal minimal moral standards that are unlikely to shed much new light. "Consider [Thomas] Nagel's discovery of an objective moral principle," Walzer tells us, "that we should not be indifferent to the suffering of other people. I acknowledge the principle but miss the excitement of revelation. I knew that already."^[4] The minimal code may command universal assent, so that "though it might require explanation, [it] would presumably not require conversion." But by the same token it will not issue in concrete injunctions for action or solve actual moral dilemmas as they arise in particular circumstances without the addition of contextually based moral argument. So we can think of the prophet Jonah as a "minimalist critic": although he issued some general injunctions for moral behavior, "we do not really know what sorts of changes he required in the life of Nineveh." Amos, by contrast, expressed his injunctions in terms the Israelites themselves embraced, so although we may be able to extract a minimal injunction from his teaching—such as "do not oppress the poor"—his power and authority "derives from his ability to say what oppression means, how it is experienced, in this time and place, and to explain how it is connected with other features of a shared social life" (Walzer 1987: 45, 89–91).

Invention may be more radically alienating than discovery because in setting up the goal of constructing an all-purpose morality, its proponents rule out those particular and parochial aspects of our lives that fashion our morality. It is "as if we were to take a hotel room or an accommodation apartment or a safe house as the ideal model of a human home." Although it may be that if deprived of a home and required to design rooms that any of us might live in "we would probably come up with something like, but not quite so culturally specific as, the Hilton Hotel." it would not be satisfying. Even if it were comfortable for all or it catered effectively to the needs of the most disadvantaged, Walzer argues in allusion to Rawls's principles of justice. "we might still long for the homes we knew we once had but could no longer remember. We would not be morally bound to live in the hotel we had designed." There is something about being at home that is essential to our sense of well-being; even in Kafka's journal hotel rooms are preferred because he feels more at home in them. Even in this case, there is "no other way to convey the sense of being in one's own place except to say 'at home'" (ibid.: 14, 15).

[4] Walzer (1987: 6, footnote omitted). As he elaborates, "What is involved in discoveries of this sort is something like a dis-incorporation of moral principles. so that we can see them, not for the first time but freshly, stripped of encrusted interests and prejudices. Seen in this way, the principles may well look objective; we 'know' them in much the same way as religious men and women know the divine law. They are, so to speak, there , waiting to be enforced. But they are only there because they are really here, features of ordinary life."

Despite his use of Gramsci's account of hegemony and the terminology of class conflict, Marxism as a philosophical system offers little from Walzer's point of view. Its explanatory theory is an instance of the path of discovery; its socialist utopia perhaps more properly described as invention. Yet its treatment of everyday beliefs as epiphenomenal writes off the vast majority of what moral argument is really about; indeed, revolutionary Marxists do not engage in social criticism at all. They are more interested in conquest than conversion:

Marxists never undertook the sort of reinterpretation of bourgeois ideas that might have produced Gramsci's "new ideological and theoretical complex." The reason for this failure lies in their view of the class struggle as an actual war in which their task, as intellectuals, was simply to support the workers…. Marxists are not properly called critics of bourgeois society, for the point of their politics is not to criticize but to overthrow the bourgeoisie. They are critics of the workers instead, insofar as the workers are ideological prisoners and so fail to fulfill their historical role as the agents of overthrow. (Ibid.: 52, 56–57)

Marxism's great mistake is that, to the extent that it acknowledges a commonality of values, it treats this as a failure to be explained in terms of false consciousness and in so doing "misses a critical opportunity to describe socialism in socially validated and comprehensible terms." Yet the only alternative for Marxists "is not to describe it at all" because discovering or inventing socialist principles anew "does not seem to have been a practical possibility. Why should the workers stake their lives for that ? Marx would have done better to take seriously his own metaphorical account of the new society growing in the womb of the old" (ibid.: 57).

Yet Walzer does not want to go all the way with the ordinary language philosophers who take people's conceptions of their ideals and actions at face value; he wants to show that often, perhaps even typically, people do not actually believe in or do what they claim to believe or do. They do not consistently apply the principles they think they live by, and as a result the moral world generated by their actions fails to measure up to the one they describe or advocate. Like Hume, then, Walzer appeals to convention^[5] but is not a conventionalist . Walzer distances himself from Oakeshott's view of interpretation, which involves the mere "pursuit of

[5] Thus he explicitly follows Hume's account of the emergence of a norm against theft, "which 'arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression and by our repeated experience of the inconvenience of violating it'" (Walzer 1987: 24, footnote omitted).

intimations" inherent in our traditions of behavior. For Walzer, although Oakeshott is right to insist that there is no "mistake-proof apparatus" that can be appealed to to tell us which intimations are most worth preserving, Oakeshott fails to see that "cultures are open to the possibility of contradiction (between principles and practices) as well as to what Oakeshott calls 'incoherence' (among everyday practices)," which makes critical political argument both possible and necessary. Interpretation, then, "does not commit us to a positivist reading of the actually existing morality" (ibid.: 29). We are all interpreters of the morality we share, and we are bound to explore and argue over the tensions that get generated within this morality and between it and our everyday practices.

(ii) Second-Order Critical Claims

At one level, then, Walzer's discussion of equality and pluralism in Spheres of Justice is simply an account of critical thinking. Individuals and groups adversely affected by the dominance and monopoly of particular goods appeal to the "abolitionist" idea of equality and make the "pluralist" claim that the patterns of convertibility currently prevailing in the interests of dominant groups involve the illicit extension of the distributive principle attending a particular good to spheres beyond those entailed by its meaning. As a descriptive thesis about how at least one major kind of political argument proceeds, Walzer's account seems both insightful and plausible. Dominant groups frequently twist and manipulate socially accepted meanings to achieve dominance and monopoly, as Walzer describes. He is surely right that these attempts to manipulate meanings can never be complete because of the many-sided nature of political terms such as equality, freedom, right, and justice. Hanna Pitkin made this clear in her response to the claim that acknowledging the Wittgensteinian equation of meaning with use need not generate historicism and relativism, as many have charged.^[6] Using a term like justice , says Pitkin, in a whole mesh of interrelated and overlapping ways limits the political manipulability of the term and its cognates and always leaves open the possibility of critical evaluation of a particular substantive use. We do (or fail to do) justice to meals as well as to criminals, to an author's intentions as well as to a corrupt politician, to our convictions as well as to our students, and this whole network of overlapping meanings cannot simply be detached from a single particular substantive use for an ulterior purpose. The Orwellian specter of a Newspeak ideology in which WAR IS PEACE and FREEDOM IS SLAVERY seems shocking to us because the degree of hegemonic

[6] See Pitkin (1972: 175–76). For a recent formulation of the conservative relativism charge, see Bloor (1983).

control this suggests (which was not total even in that case) would require a revolution in accepted meanings and uses so complete that the very possibility of critical appraisal of what appear to us now as deviant uses would be foreclosed. But limiting cases are limiting cases, and their very existence indicates that our normal expectations and experiences are different. In practice hegemony is never complete and acquiescence in relations of domination by the dominated is intrinsically vulnerable to immanent attack. In this connection it should be noted that Walzer sees his embracing of prevailing valuations of social goods as a starting point for immanent critical argument, not as the conclusion to a Burkean endorsement of the status quo. This is neatly summed up in the context of his rejection of the Marxist tactic of refusing to acknowledge the importance of the pluralist ideal in liberal societies when he says that "the point is not to reject separation [of spheres] as Marx did but to endorse and extend it, to enlist liberal artfulness in the service of socialism" (Walzer 1984a: 318).

Walzer describes himself as deliberately standing "in the cave, in the city, on the ground" and denies that he is searching for an "ideal map or a master plan." Instead he has sought the "guiding thread" of his argument in the struggles of particular ideologies in conflict (Walzer 1983a: xiv, 26, 12). Yet he does want to offer his own substantive account, which moves beyond a description of the dynamics of ideological conflict in at least two ways. The more general of these concerns the proposition that in advocating pluralism and equality he is doing no more than advocating critical argument. Because he seems to think that patterns of domination and the "convertibility" they bring with them never disappear but are simply replaced by different ones, he might, at first blush, be read as having sympathies for oppressed groups and encouraging them to attack prevailing patterns of domination and the convertibility of dominant goods. The consistent position underlying this claim would be sympathy for the underdog without a substantive positive position beyond this. This reading of Walzer would make it an act of bad faith for the social critic to accept any prevailing distribution of social goods because of the convertibility it brings with it. The only viable standpoint is a perpetually critical attitude toward existing distributive practices, whatever these might be.

Yet this characterization misses the fact that Walzer does not call, as Marx did, for relentless criticism of all existing institutions. Indeed, it is integral to Walzer's conception of effective social criticism that the critic retain a basic moral and emotional connectedness to the community whose practices he criticizes. This is what Walzer finds admirable in Camus's attitude toward the pied noir community during the Algerian war, in contrast to such French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de

Beauvoir, who "established their detachment and denounced the local barbarians" but refused to see atrocities on the other side. They separated themselves, ideologically and emotionally, from the, pied noir community by blind and unconditional support for the FLN against the French. So although de Beauvoir knew about the brutality of the FLN's internal wars, she "chose not to write about it; she seems never to have given a thought to the likely fate of the pied noir community after an FLN victory." She defined the FLN as representing liberation in an "ideologically flattened world" and thus achieved critical distance at the price of something close to hypocrisy. Her severing of herself from the French nation with de Gaulle's return to power in 1958 amounted to a denial of her identity (Walzer 1984b: 426–27). Sartre took a similar view, believing that the intellectual must adopt the role of "permanent critic." The danger with this posture is that the intellectual who cuts loose all parochial ties may find himself "with no concrete and substantive values at all." In that case "universality turns out to be an empty category for deconditioned men and women, and so their commitment to the movement of the oppressed is (as Sartre at one point says it should be) 'unconditional.'" Walzer is thus unsurprised that once Sartre committed himself to the Algerian nationalists, "he seemed incapable of a critical word about their principles or policies. Henceforth he aimed his ideas, as a soldier with more justification might aim his gun, in only one direction" (Walzer 1987: 57–58). Camus, by contrast, is admirable for Walzer because he refused to do this. Camus belonged to a community that (from the Marxist point of view he largely accepted) was "historically in the wrong," but although he criticized the French he would not renounce his own community and detach himself from it. He accepted who he was. "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice," Camus said, a proposition that Walzer adapts and incorporates by saying that a conception of justice that has no place for love is unacceptable. "Camus had no use for philosophers who loved humanity and disdained the men and women among whom they lived." Thus he asks how a solution to the problems of Algeria "that ignored Camus's mother, or the interests of the pied noir community generally, could possibly be just. Men and women don't lose their rights even if they are 'historically in the wrong.'"

Here Walzer is making more than the familiar point that it is moral cowardice, not moral courage, to run away from a difficult situation and criticize it from a safe distance (although he clearly wants to say that); he also wants to say that justifiable social criticism must have an affective component, that we must have connections with, and commitments to, the communities whose practices we criticize. "Even 'true intellectuals'

have parents, friends, familiar places, warm memories," he notes. "Perfect solitude, like existential heroism, is a romantic idea" (Walzer 1984b: 428–30). Because we all have powerful emotional commitments of this kind, a view of critical thinking that ignores—or pours scorn on—them cannot be acceptable.^[7] In Interpretation and Social Criticism Walzer modifies this view slightly, recognizing that criticism may require a degree of critical distance. "It is not clear, though, how much distance critical distance is," and he continues to resist the "conventional view" that treats radical detachment as the critical ideal.^[8] Marginal people or "members of subject classes or oppressed minorities, or even outcasts and pariahs" might be good critics. But none of these is unconnected. Indeed, the conventional view is at fault precisely for requiring that even the marginal critic be "detached from his own marginality."

In the conventional view, the critic is not really a marginal figure; he is—he has made himself into—an outsider, a spectator, a "total stranger," a man from Mars. He derives a kind of critical authority from the distance he establishes. We might compare him to an imperial judge in a backward colony. He stands outside, in some privileged place, where he has access to "advanced" or universal principles; and he applies these principles with an impersonal (intellectual) rigor. He has no other interest in the colony except to bring it to the bar of justice. (Walzer 1987: 36, 37, 38)

The detached critic is often thought to be heroic, "for it is a hard business … to wrench oneself loose, either emotionally or intellectually. To walk 'alone … and in the dark' [as Descartes sought to do] is bound to be frightening." Yet Walzer is less than impressed by this heroism; whereas the detached critic may pay a price in terms of lost "comfort and solidarity,"

[7] Walzer is thus unimpressed by Foucault's refusal to identify with any interest or community as its intellectual spokesman, with his much flaunted political detachment. "[O]ne cannot even be downcast, angry, grim, indignant, sullen or embittered with reason unless one inhabits some social setting and adopts, however tentatively, its codes and categories" or, much more difficult, unless one tries to create alternative codes and categories. Foucault refuses to do either, and his relentlessly critical stance is, for Walzer, uninteresting even if it is intelligible. See Walzer (1983b: 490).

[8] "I do not mean to banish the dispassionate stranger or the estranged native. They have their place in the critical story, but only alongside and in the shadow of someone quite different and more familiar: the local judge, the connected critic, who earns his authority, or fails to do so, by arguing with his fellows—who, angrily and insistently, sometimes at considerable personal risk … objects, protests, and remonstrates. This critic is one of us" (Walzer 1987: 38–39).

it is more than compensated for once detachment is achieved. Disentangled from the complexities and commitments of everyday life in society, criticism becomes both easy and costless (ibid.: 36–37).

The standard view of critical distance, then, rests on the homely but misguided analogy that we are more likely to find fault with others than with ourselves. This leads us to turn our own people into "the others"—to treat them as strangers or make ourselves strangers to them.

The trouble with the analogy is that such easy fault-finding is never very effective. It can be brutal enough, but it doesn't touch the conscience of the people to whom it is addressed. The task of the social critic is precisely to touch the conscience. Hence heretics, prophets, insurgent intellectuals, rebels—Camus's kind of rebels—are insiders all: they know the texts and the tender places of their own culture. Criticism is a more intimate activity than the standard view allows. (Walzer 1984b: 432)

The attractiveness of the model of detached criticism derives from the expectation that if we can only get the critical standards right, "the argument can be won once and for all. Hence that heroic figure, the perfectly disinterested spectator, imagined as a kind of all-purpose, general-service social critic." The claim of detached criticism rests on a divided view of the self. Self one is "still involved, committed, parochial, angry," while the second is "detached, dispassionate, impartial," and quietly watching the first. Self two is thought in the conventional view to be superior, his criticism "more reliable and objective, more likely to tell us the moral truth about the world in which the critic and all the rest of us live. Self three would be better still." Yet why would self two be interested in criticism at all? Would such a detached critic not rather adopt the role of "radical skeptic or a mere spectator or a playful interventionist, like the Greek gods"? If self two abandons the moral beliefs and motivations of self one, he cannot "experience those beliefs and motivations in the same way, once he has evacuated the moral world within which they have their immediate reality and distanced himself from the person for whom they are real." Radical detachment involves "drowning out" the values "that arise from the critic's own life in his own time and place." Although this detachment can certainly result in mandates for radical social and political change, it is "more likely to be a conversion or a conquest," the "total replacement of the society from which the critic has detached himself with some (imagined or actual) other." Walzer does not go so far as to exclude all such criticism by definition, but he sees it most often as morally unattractive,

not a form of objectivity that we should admire (Walzer 1987: 50, 49–50, 51, 52).

Strategically, no one in the relevant community minds what the unconnected critic says because of his lack of connectedness. "The detached and disinterested moralist goes on and on, and we don't care." His opinions do not matter, but those of the connected critic do because the latter accepts us. Our notions of self-esteem, and our sense of collective legitimacy, are bound up with that acceptance because the critic is an identifying, constitutive component of our community. The critic must speak to those who accept, respect, and even rely on him if he is to speak effectively. He must pull them by their own convictions to the position he advocates; to do this, he must retain their acceptance and respect. There must be bonds of mutuality, intellectual and emotional; there must be "commitment to particularity" for social criticism to work. "It's not that one severs the threads [with one's community] in order to become a critic, but that the force of one's criticism leads one to think about severing the threads." Yet this temptation must be resisted "for the social critic must have standing among his fellow citizens. He exploits his connections, as it were, not his disconnections." If an identifying social critic so despairs of his own community's actions as to be reduced to silence—as Camus eventually was by the irretrievable deterioration of the Algerian conflict—this speaks more powerfully than the self-righteous outpourings of the unconnected critic. "The silence of the connected social critic is a grim sign—a sign of defeat, a sign of endings. Though he may not be wrong to be silent, we long to hear his voice" (Walzer 1984b: 432, 426, 432).

Commitment to particularity, then, is at the heart of good social criticism. Again Walzer finds an analogy to judging helpful on this point, although what he has in mind might be more accurately described as common law making. The question presented to courts, he notes, invariably refers "to a particular body of laws or to a particular constitutional text, and there is no way to answer the question except by giving an account of the laws or the text." Neither the accumulated body of law nor the statutory texts have "the simplicity and precision of a yardstick against which we might measure the different actions urged by the contending parties. Deprived of a yardstick, we rely on exegesis, commentary, and historical precedent, a tradition of argument and interpretation" (Walzer 1987: 22). Although every given interpretation will turn out to be contentious, we must accept that just as there is no alternative in legal argument, so too there is none in moral argument. In debates about equality and affirmative action, for example, many of us take it for granted that the question "what is the right thing to do?" is the correct question.

The general question about the right thing to do is quickly turned into some more specific question—about the career open to talents, let's say, and then about equal opportunity, affirmative action and quotas. These … require us to argue about what a career is, what sorts of talents we ought to recognize, whether equal opportunity is a "right," and if it is, what social policies it mandates. These questions are pursued within a tradition of moral discourse—indeed they only arise within that tradition—and they are pursued by interpreting the terms of that discourse. The argument is about ourselves; the meaning of our way of life is what is at issue. The general question we finally answer is not quite the one we asked at first. It has a crucial addition: what is the right thing for us to do? (Ibid.: 23, footnote omitted)

(iii) First-Order Critical Claims

How does this account of Walzer's view of critical thinking enable us to understand his concrete political claims? The relationship between these two levels of argument is difficult to pin down, partly because of an ambiguity in Walzer's uses of the concepts of pluralism and equality in Spheres of Justice . The ambiguity is between the uses already described—to indicate the mechanisms by which systems of domination and the convertibility of dominant goods are regularly challenged and displaced (equality as abolitionist politics and pluralism as the means for advocating separation of control of a particular good from another)—and the substantive, characteristically liberal commitments to doctrines of pluralism and equality. Advocating pluralism and equality as a method of attacking any and all systems of domination and control on the grounds that this method best takes account of the typical nature of political conflict differs from engaging in substantive criticism of prevailing doctrines of pluralism and equality in contemporary liberal culture, and Walzer clearly wants to engage in the second activity as well as the first. He wants to apply his pluralist and egalitarian method of social criticism to the doctrines of pluralism and equality as they work themselves out in contemporary liberal practices to show that the latter function to legitimate practices of domination and the convertibility of dominant goods.

For Walzer, that liberals have characteristically failed to oppose various kinds of domination and the convertibility of dominant goods—despite their professed commitments to substantive doctrines of pluralism and equality—tends to be "less importantly a failure of nerve than a failure of perception." He has no conspiracy theory of liberal ideology; liberal writers

"literally did not 'see' individual wealth and corporate power," for example "as social forces, with a political weight, as it were, different from their market value." For this reason they genuinely thought they had done enough to secure liberty by creating a market, opposing state intervention, and setting entrepreneurs free; they did not perceive either the extent to which such institutions would require an active state for their effective maintenance or the possibilities for the corruption of other social spheres (notably politics) inherent in the evolution of the market system (Walzer 1984a: 322). Walzer wants to show liberals that they "have not been serious enough about their own art" of separating spheres of social and political activity (ibid.: 320).

Walzer's essential claim, then, is that if we take seriously prevalent conceptions of pluralism and equality within their own terms, they generate conclusions that many liberals would find unacceptably radical, resting as they do on substantive accounts of the good and of the good community. The immanent logic of these accounts requires practices that are frequently at variance with contemporary liberal practices. "Complex equality" requires determining the meanings of the goods that prevail in different spheres of social interaction and then shoring up the boundaries among them. Equality, for Walzer, "is a complex relation of persons, mediated by the goods we make, share, and divide among ourselves," not "an identity of possessions." It requires "a diversity of distributive criteria that mirrors the diversity of social goods" (Walzer 1983a: 18). Contemporary liberal culture is hypocritical in that the dominance of certain spheres by distributive criteria alien to them contravenes its professed pluralist foundations. It is not that Walzer has a general theory that pluralism is good and dominance is bad; his point is that these are the official values of liberal culture. Part of what pluralism means is acknowledging the existence of a plurality of goods and practices making up the social world, goods and practices that are neither reducible to one another nor intrinsically better or worse than one another. The social differentiation that prevails in modern Western culture (a comparatively recent development) is basic to the conventional liberal outlook. Thus the "old, preliberal map [of society] showed a largely undifferentiated land mass"; what we today refer to as pluralism assumes a society divided into spheres of activity undertaken by different groups for different purposes, a society based, as Walzer puts it, on the "art of separation" (Walzer 1984a: 315). That we characteristically refer to the use of money to obtain political influence as bribery indicates how we value it—we regard it as an illegitimate extension of money into the political sphere (Walzer 1983a: 100). The critic who turns around and says, "Aha! There is a suppressed major premise

behind such a claim holding that bribery is bad" is missing the point. No one doubts that bribery is bad; if they did they would not describe it as bribery. There may be many substantive disagreements about whether a particular action counts as bribery, about whether Abscam-style entrapment mitigates bribery, and so on, but the very existence of such controversies indicates a wide consensus on the evaluative-descriptive content (to use a term of Quentin Skinner's [1973: 298–304]) of the term itself. Similar points could be made concerning Walzer's use of such terms as dominance, monopoly, tyranny, and justice , the key elements of his critical analysis. His point is that if we look critically at liberal culture in terms of its official values, we will come up with conclusions that have a uniquely decisive moral force in liberal culture. Where our practices fail to measure up they will be revealed as endorsing hypocrisy and pretense. Again Walzer has no general moral theory to which he turns to be told that hypocrisy is bad; his point is that if you reveal people to be hypocritical they will see their own actions as reprehensible. Think again of Pitkin's point about the limits to the manipulability of the term justice . The Abscam bribee will (apart from the issue of positive legal sanctions) try endlessly to explain why he was not really accepting a bribe, for in many other contexts he must attack bribery, and he does not want to be revealed as a hypocrite.

This sort of evidence is important for Walzer. The ubiquitous practice of social criticism underlines the extent to which morality has to do with justification in the eyes of others. "Men and women are driven to build and inhabit moral worlds by a moral motive: a passion for justification," Walzer argues. Although this passion might once have been satiated by an appeal to religious or other extrinsic standards, in a secular age the appeal has to be other people.

It is not only rulers who want to be justified in the eyes of their subjects; each of us wants to be justified in the eyes of all the others…. We try to justify ourselves, but we cannot justify ourselves by ourselves, and so morality takes shape as a conversation with particular other people, our relatives, friends, and neighbors…. Because we know the people, we can, we have to, give these arguments some specificity: they are more like "love thy neighbor" (with a suitable gloss on all three words) than "don't be indifferent to the suffering of others." They are worked out with reference to an actual, not merely a speculative, moral discourse: not one person but many people talking. (Walzer 1987: 46–47)

Perhaps the clearest illustration of Walzer's method of immanent criticism at work on the substantive egalitarian and pluralist commitments of liberal ideology can be found in his defense of industrial democracy as the economic analogue of religious democracy implied by the liberal principle of religious toleration. His basic argument is that liberalism requires abolition of the power exercised outside the market by the possessors of wealth within the market for the same reasons as it required the disestablishment of the church. He notes that pluralism worked against "state churches and church states" not only by disestablishing the churches themselves but also by divesting them of their enormous secular wealth and power; that historically this was justified not only by Lutheran appeals to private conscience but also in the name of congregational self-government; and that while this is not the only possible institutional arrangement once church and state are separate, it is "the cultural form best adapted to and most likely to reinforce the separation" liberalism requires. Analogously, the pluralist art of separation must work against "both state capitalism and the capitalist state" (Walzer 1984a: 322).

Just as religious disestablishment would have been a fiction had the church not been divested of its instruments of public power, the market system today, although nominally private, is not effectively walled into this space; in fact, there is a "ready convertibility of wealth into power, privilege and position." The de facto private governments thus created must be socialized just as established churches were; the goal must be "the confinement of the market to its proper space" (ibid.: 322–23). This is why religious democracy must find its parallel in an industrial democracy with two main features: there must be room for the new entrepreneur ("just as there is room for the evangelist and the 'gathered' church") and there should not be room for economic power to shape public policy ("any more than for the high ecclesiastical authority that routinely calls upon the 'secular arm'"). Political power requires protection "not only against foreign conquest but also against domestic seizure." The liberal state must be made by liberals to live up to liberal proclamations of its neutrality with respect to different private lives, and "the idea of privacy presupposes the equal value, at least so far as the authorities are concerned, of all private lives." This can be true only if the state cannot be hostage to private economic power (ibid.: 323, 326, 320).

For Walzer it makes no sense to consider abolishing so enduring a characteristic of our current circumstances as the market system or to reject outright so central an aspect of contemporary culture as the market ideology. To do this would cost too much credibility. Rather the market's critic must turn the market on itself and show that the liberal ideal of freedom

from domination that the market system is supposed to preserve requires a degree of socialization of capital and industrial democracy. For if capital takes control of the state and is convertible into power in other spheres, it must ultimately threaten everything from academic freedom to the system of meritocratic advancement that even capitalism requires for its continued well-being.

The logic of Walzer's analysis is reminiscent of Marx's (1974: 76–87) discussion of the fetishism of commodities. Just as Marx argued that this fetishism arises when what is actually a social relation among producers appears as a material relation among things and that people's failure to perceive the socially interdependent character of production hides from them the reality that they do not own what they make (as liberal ideology on its surface requires), so Walzer wants to reject the social primacy of the market for comparable reasons. Individual rights and the requirements of individual consent, although essential to the market system, make for a "bad sociology. They do not provide either a rich or a realistic understanding of social cohesion; nor do they make sense of the lives individuals actually live, and the rights they actually enjoy, within the framework of on-going institutions" (ibid.: 324).

Walzer and Marx differ, of course, in their explanations of the convertibility of capital into a mechanism of broad social and political power, and Marx would doubtless voice skepticism at the claim that it is possible to have a well-functioning market system appropriately walled in from other decisive areas of social and political life: for him the logical imperatives of capitalist production and accumulation made this impossible. Although it may be a sound criticism of Walzer to say that he needs to tell us more about how the appropriately walled in market is going to function (not least because of the lack of historical illustrations), how capital formation is going to occur, how wages will be set, and so on, it can be argued that he is pushing in the most viable direction. Marx never supplied a convincing theoretical account of how an efficient allocation of resources and production would occur without a market system, and in those industrial countries that have tried to do without it in the name of communism, the inefficiencies are both chronic and legion. Moreover these systems have not come close to reducing domination in Walzer's sense. Marx's whimsical and utopian dictatorship of the proletariat was transformed as it traveled into practice on the wings of Lenin's vanguard theory, and the reality has been dictatorship to the proletariat by the vanguard party. There has been no withering away of communist states, as Walzer notes in his critique of Foucault's exclusive concentration on the local exercise of power (Walzer 1983b: 487–88). Ironically perhaps, Foucault is guilty of a pluralist ignorance

(or ignoring) of the decisive coercive power of the centralized state in the modern world, something that Walzer thinks undeniably central to all systems of political power and domination, not least those that prevail in the Soviet bloc countries.^[9] The sources of domination differ under communist, but it is not credible to deny their existence; for this reason communist systems cannot be argued to be even provisional solutions from the standpoint of the dominated classes under liberal capitalism. It cannot therefore be surprising that Walzer does not explore this revolutionary possibility as a viable option for the capitalist democracies. Whether his critique of communist practices would make any sense from the standpoint of a social critic living in a so-called socialist country would be a different question, one Walzer has not explicitly addressed. But one would have to anticipate that it would not—that Walzer would expect social criticism in such circumstances to focus on the discrepancies between socialist ideology and practice, not between socialist practice and liberal ideology.^[10]

II. Walzer's View: Three Difficulties

Walzer's argument contains much that is attractive, even compelling. Yet it confronts difficulties relating to its assumptions about the nature of political conflict and the content of social criticism, and his account of connected criticism must ultimately be rejected. Powerful as it is as a set of strategic considerations for the effective conduct of social criticism in certain circumstances, it fails as an account of political theory as social criticism.

(i) Intra- and Intercultural Political Conflict

Unlike Rorty, Walzer does confront the problem of conflicting values within and among cultures. He distinguishes two kinds of moral disagreements: those "within a cultural tradition" where people "interpret meanings in somewhat different ways or … take different positions on boundary

[9] "[Foucault] provides no principled distinction, so far as I can see, between the Gulag and the carceral archipelagos…. Nor does he provide a genealogy of the Gulag and, what is probably more important, his account of the carceral archipelago contains no hint of how or why our own society stops short of the Gulag…. [He] believes that discipline is necessary for this particular society—capitalist, modern or whatever; he abhors all its forms, every sort of confinement and control, and so for him liberalism is nothing more than discipline concealed. For neither Hobbes nor Foucault does the constitution or the law or even the actual workings of the political system make any difference…. In fact, I think these things make all the difference" (1983b: 487).

[10] This is certainly suggested by Walzer's analysis of Breyten Breytenbach in The Company of Critics , where Walzer argues that even apartheid is amenable to connected criticism. See Walzer (1988: 210–24).

disputes and on overlapping or entangled goods" (such as in arguments about quotas and affirmative action in contemporary America) and those disagreements that derive from "radically different cultural traditions, as in many third world states today."^[11]

This distinction is not without its difficulties, however. For one thing, it is not obviously a characteristic of Third World as distinct from First World states, as witness the example of Northern Ireland. Walzer might readily concede this as an exceptional case, but consider a more typical one: the 1984 miners' strike in Britain that centered on the issue of whether comparatively inefficient pits should be closed even though such closure would mean certain destruction of various mining communities. Certainly some disputed the claim that the pits were unsalvageable from the standpoint of economic efficiency, but many accepted that their continued operation would involve a state subsidy (at least in terms of opportunity-cost pricing) but maintained that members of the mining communities were justified in expecting and requiring that the government not close down the pits. Some might say that this is a paradigm case of Walzer's "overlapping and entangled goods" in a society committed to both utilitarian efficiency and the value of preserving local communities and their unique traditions. But certainly not all the relevant actors in this dispute conceived of it this way. Some saw it as a battle to wrest decisive control of British industry from the unions and return to Parliament the authority to decide on the management of the public sector, a battle between Margaret Thatcher's government and the unions over "who governs Britain." Some, like Arthur Scargill, saw the conflict as an opportunity to transform the underlying socioeconomic structure into one in which a social wage trumps considerations of utilitarian efficiency. Others, such as many miners and their families, had no commitment to any such programmatic agenda; they simply attached supreme importance to their jobs and communities, without particularly caring about the broader socioeconomic consequences of preserving them. It might be argued that they had no business taking that attitude because they existed in and depended on the national economy in a multitude of ways, but to make an argument of this form is to accept a globalizing logic that most liberals, as well as Walzer I suspect, would want to avoid. In any case it seems antithetical to the idea of taking conventional beliefs as a basis for political argument to declare some subclass of them illegitimate. Walzer's more likely response would be that we need to show these particular protagonists that their view of things entails paying attention to other issues (convincing

[11] New York Review of Books , July 21, 1983, p. 44.

parochial miners that it is in their interest, that in the long run it will do less damage to their communities—or do damage to fewer of those communities—if serious account is taken of the imperatives for the health of the British coal industry as a whole). Taking Walzer's claim that political argument proceeds in terms of "internal principles," we can imagine trying to pull these parochial miners by their own convictions to a less parochial view.

One difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the conflict is not zero-sum, that there is in principle a solution that speaks both to the needs of efficiency and to those of the local communities such that the miners can be pulled by their convictions into accepting a different construction of the situation. Walzer's distinction between two kinds of disagreements takes too little account of the many conflicts within the advanced capitalist countries where there is a range of possible solutions (outcomes might be a better term) that benefit different groups differently and no obvious "best" solution. Ultimately in such conflicts there are winners and losers—winners at the expense of losers—and some subcultures, groups, and communities survive, reproduce themselves, and thrive at the expense of others. This is consistent with Walzer's descriptive thesis about the nature of ideological conflict but not obviously so with any particular solution or outcome to a conflict that Walzer or anyone else might want to advocate. To say that justice must take account of the interests of all the parties (as Walzer argued with respect to the pied noir community in Algeria) does not tell us how that account is to be taken or indeed whether there is a solution that speaks adequately to the interests of all the relevant parties. Walzer's distinction between First and Third World countries as paradigmatic of disagreements within and between cultural traditions assumes that in First World countries there could be solutions to distributive disagreements that could speak, in principle, to the interests of all and that we could all be brought to agree both on what the appropriate division within a sphere should be and on the correct lines of demarcation among spheres. Even when allocation of a good within a sphere is not a zero-sum problem, we may be unable to agree on how a surplus is to be divided. Once we acknowledge this, the possibility has to be taken seriously that sides will have to be taken that may entail disconnecting from a particular dominant group and refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of its claims.^[12] Anything less may simply perpetuate the distributive status quo

[12] In Shapiro (1989b) I argue that a degree of illegitimacy attaches to every possible distribution of goods and power and indeed that this fact generates a unique justification for democratic decision making over the allocation of all social goods. This issue is taken up more generally in chapter 9, section II.

because the dominant group may refuse to make a significant movement. A certain amount of what Walzer refers to as "ideological flattening" doubtless occurs in all such circumstances, but this can surely be construed as necessary for maintaining links with the community one genuinely values. The price of maintaining Walzerian connectedness to one's community may be disconnecting from communities that threaten it.

Joseph Frank (1985: 105–7) makes an analogous point when he notes that it is quite possible to agree with Walzer's analysis of the merits and demerits of the respective positions of Sartre and Camus on the Algerian war but reverse the characterizations of disconnection and connection. Sartre's primary reference group was the French intelligentsia, "predominantly left-wing and in favor of the anti-colonial uprising; [he] was not risking anything he valued by going along with them . On the contrary, he was very eager to keep their favor." Camus, by contrast, "lived and wrote in the same 'world' and functioned in a very similar 'champ intellectuel' [as Sartre]; but his response was considerably different." Although he did not renounce the French intellectuals, his position alienated them, and in this regard it was Camus who became disconnected. Frank goes further, arguing that Camus's refusal to take the side of the pied noir community unconditionally alienated him from it as well; thus the price of his "genuine independence" of mind was forcible disconnection from all.

To this Walzer might respond that in cases where political or distributive conflict is zero-sum, there is simply no just solution to it,^[13] but what some of us find difficult to accept is that this is not the typical case, particularly in recent years in the advanced capitalist democracies. During the 1970s, when everyone was writing about liberal corporatism and the inevitability of a negotiated social-democratic consensus among business, government, and labor, the alternative view might have been convincing. But in an era when the governments of the New Right on both sides of the Atlantic have flatly rejected this consensus, are busily dismantling the welfare state, and are successfully engaging in open warfare with organized labor in ways that most social scientists once thought impossible, this view seems altogether too benign for our circumstances. At the very least it cannot be accepted without argument that most significant distributive conflict in advanced capitalist countries is intracultural in Walzer's sense.^[14]

[13] In the case of Algeria, Walzer hints (1984b: 430) that partition might have n a solution, but the examples on record—Poland, India, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and the West Bank—are neither individually nor collectively encouraging.

[14] For my own views on these developments as they relate to macroeconomic policy-making, see Shapiro and Kane (1983: 5–39).

Walzer is aware of this difficulty. In his dispute with Dworkin over the provision of medical care in the United States, he acknowledges that different distributive principles are embraced by different people but continues to argue that "justice demands" a more egalitarian distribution of medical care in our society "because of what medical care means to us." Of this argument Walzer says,

The argument is historical, sociological, contingent. Dworkin wants an entirely different kind of argument, so that one might say at the end, flatly, that a rich society that leaves medical care to the market "would not be a just society." I am in fact disinclined to say that just like that, for it may be the case that the wealth of some particular society ought to be spent on the cure of souls, not of bodies, or on defense, or drama, or education. I don't see how these priorities can be philosophically determined. But that is not to rule out radical criticism, for the actual distribution of salvation, security, and culture is likely to be distorted, has historically been distorted, by wealthy and powerful elites, and it is one of the tasks of moral philosophy (and of social theory too) to explain and condemn the distortions.^[15]

But what precisely is being claimed here? What is this notion of distortion that makes social criticism possible and necessary? The claim that the solution to such conflicts cannot be "philosophically determined" is reminiscent of Marx's critique of German idealism summed up in the Theses on Feuerbach, but for Marx the rejection of philosophical solutions to questions of social justice in societies based on class conflict and domination entailed a programmatic concern with the actual structure and dynamics of that conflict and domination that both explained it and provided a basis for radical criticism of it. Marx had no qualms about articulating a theory of objective human interests in terms of which social relationships could be criticized. The real question for Walzer, who wants to avoid such commitments, is how to make sense of a notion of distortion without such a theory.^[16]

Two issues present themselves in this regard. The first, which will

[15] New York Review of Books, July 21, 1983, p. 44.

[16] Walzer offers one tantalizing hint that he does have such a theory when he remarks that the stance of the social critic is natural: "We know that we do not live up to the standards that might justify us. And if we ever forget that knowledge, the social critic appears to remind us. His critical interpretation is the 'natural' one, given what morality is. Like Shaw's Englishman, the social critic 'does everything on principle.' But he is a serious, not a comic, figure because his principles are ones we share" (Walzer 1987: 48).

trouble many others more than it does this author, is whether Walzer can talk in terms of the distortions in a culture without having some implicit account of what an undistorted culture would be like.^[17] To this there are three arguments in Walzer's defense. First, he can argue by reference to his account of the general dynamics of ideological conflict that in any culture there will invariably be distortions to be attacked and criticized because of the convertibility of dominant goods. There will always be those who benefit from prevailing patterns of convertibility at others' expense; these others will challenge dominance via arguments that the meanings of the relevant goods themselves do not justify prevailing distributive practices. Second, with regard to his analysis of the substantive doctrines of pluralism and equality in contemporary America, we have already seen that Walzer can give substantive content to immanent criticism by arguing that liberal practices violate liberal ideology in this specific sense: the liberal doctrines of pluralism and equality entail a state that enforces the autonomy of spheres of social action in some neutral way that is belied by liberal practices. This is not to say that philosophical accounts of neutral states are internally consistent or coherent but that there is this component in the dominant ideology: that life in liberal culture is undistorted, or at least that something is wrong if it is not. Whether or not the notion of an undistorted culture makes theoretical sense and whether or not such a culture could arise in practice, given the dynamics of ideological evolution that Walzer describes, basic assumptions about the lack of distortion in the official values of liberal culture can supply resources for attacking such structures of domination and convertibility as can be shown to exist. Again Marx's discussion of the fetishism of commodities comes to mind: that the bourgeois ideal of neutral exchange is belied by the practices conducted in its name. Whether there could be a system of exchange where analogous things did not happen is another matter.

Third, it is simply not true in general that the concept of distortion when applied as a descriptive term about social practices presupposes some account of an undistorted culture. To assume the converse is to take too little account of the negative and reactive ways in which we evaluate and try to alter social practices. We are constantly made aware, as we stumble through life, of what is inadequate, unworkable, unsatisfying, and unfair in vast areas of individual and social existence without necessarily having

[17] This is implied in Dworkin's charge that Walzer, in Spheres of Justice, tacitly assumes that there are only a limited number of spheres of justice whose essential principles have been established in advance and must therefore remain the same for all societies." See the New York Review of Books, April 14, 1983, p. 6.

at our disposal well-formulated notions of adequacy, workableness, satisfaction, and fairness. Here the evolutionary metaphors discussed in relation to Quine and Rorty in the last chapter are worth calling to mind. Organisms adapt and change in essentially negative terms, shying away from practices that threaten. When one strategy does not work they try another. They try to deal with the inadequacies of their circumstances by altering them. But none of this entails that adequate circumstances exist from the point of view of a particular organism or that if they do it will know and pursue them. Someone may well be able to diagnose a situation as inadequate to her needs and/or aspirations without knowing what, if anything, would be adequate. Think of how many unhappily married people experience precisely that predicament. Walzer's uses of the idea of social distortion resulting from mechanisms of domination and the convertibility of dominant goods might be thought of in such terms.^[18] A set of distributive practices that confers power on some at the expense of others, despite official proclamations to the contrary, can seem unsatisfactory to the dominated (and no doubt to some of the dominant—if only for the reason supplied in Hegel's Phenomenology ), even if they have no idea of what would be satisfactory distributive practices in general or whether these could be achieved in principle or in fact. There is a negative and adaptive evolutionary component to all biologically based life, and human life is no exception. It has a backward-looking and evasive quality that constantly confronts us with distortions and inadequacies, with what is unacceptable and no good in our lives, with the failures of individuals and of social mechanisms to survive and thrive. These facts frequently generate the desire for general theories of good, adequate, and undistorted social arrangements, but this does not for a moment entail that these can be articulated or attained even if they can be described.

It can plausibly be argued, then, that for these reasons Walzer's comments about social criticism being directed at prevailing cultural distortions need not require or presuppose a general theory of an undistorted culture. In linguistic terms, Walzer's critical account of prevailing linguistic norms need not presuppose any Habermasian theory of ideal speech situations and communicative competence. However, a second matter remains to be addressed. This concerns the substantive accounts of domination and convertibility on which the practice of immanent criticism depends. In each of the three sets of reasons just supplied to defend Walzer's account of social criticism against the charge—leveled by Dworkin—that

[18] This is not to say that Walzer would accept this as a characterization of his view.

there is an implicit preordained general theory behind Walzer's account, assumptions were made about actual practices and their conformity, or lack of it, to those required by prevailing ideological norms. If prevailing practices are to be criticized for this reason, however, such criticism will depend on an account of the practices themselves. We need to know what is going on in a given situation, who the dominators and the dominated are (seldom an uncontroversial question—the example of the French in Algeria is atypical in this regard because none of the protagonists wanted to argue that the French were not "historically in the wrong"), what the realistic alternatives are, and how they would benefit and harm different groups differently. Walzer is right to point out that these are not philosophical questions, and in denying this it seems writers like Dworkin are simply expecting too much from philosophical theories. But in making this claim Walzer is implicitly acknowledging the vast empirical tasks that confront the social critic. He cannot simply assume that the capitalist countries have reached the point where all significant distributive conflict is intracultural, for this assumes away some of the most contentious and controversial, but nonetheless central, cases.

(ii) The Content of Social Criticism

Leaving aside questions about the empirical nature of distributive conflict, a lacuna in Walzer's account of the moral content of social criticism has to be addressed. His substantive accounts of complex equality and pluralism are intended to provide the basis for a critique of prevailing practices in terms of the official values of liberal culture, and his discussion of industrial democracy was presented as a paradigm case of this immanent criticism at work. But the same question arises that arose in relation to Rorty: are liberal values as Walzer describes them the dominant values in American culture? Are they the official values such that his social critique will serve the function that he says social criticism must; will he touch the consciences of those he seeks to influence? There seems a case to be made that Walzer's account is a partial depiction of dominant American values and that there are other powerful influences—republican, nationalist, and antisocialist, for example—which limit American commitment to liberal and pluralist values in practice and which call into question whether most American consciences would be touched, for instance, by Walzer's parallels between disestablishment of the church and industrial democracy.

There are available to Walzer two responses to this charge that were not available to Rorty. The first is that Walzer can concede this point without making his whole analysis vulnerable because he is not holding that we

live in a culture that is in its fundamental structure pluralist and egalitarian; his account of the dynamics of ideological conflict leaves room for the view that actual social practices deviate widely from official values. He thus carries a much less heavy burden than Rorty, for whom liberalism is supposed accurately to characterize both the dominant ideology and the actual social structure, so that it is unnecessary even to consider that there might be systematic divergences between the two. Indeed, as we saw, for Rorty we cannot even formulate questions about this relationship without venturing from the Garden of Eden and corrupting ourselves with meta-narrative. For Walzer the socially constitutive character of beliefs means that ideology and practice are inevitably and intimately related, but the relationship between the two is not taken for granted and treated as transparent. On the contrary Walzer supplies us with good reasons for expecting there to be tensions between ideology and practice, tensions that are the raison d'être of social criticism and that can be exploited by the social critic.

Yet the question remains, what will Walzer say to the moralizing conservative republican with his interventionist social agenda who rejects liberal constructions of the principle of toleration out of hand, probably believes that we would be living in a better world had the church not been disestablished, and is openly hostile to the proposition that the state has no business interfering with a range of activities that have traditionally been regarded by liberals as part of the private sphere? One suspects that Walzer's response would be to challenge the extent to which such anti-liberal notions have an exclusive hold on even the most doctrinaire members of the New Right. After all, their interventionist social agenda is typically accompanied by an extreme laissez-faire attitude in matters economic, and a liberal critic could at least hope to find some ideological opening by pressing for an explanation of this disjunction: finding some point at which the opponent does adhere to more traditional liberal notions and working at the boundaries of his convictions. So Walzer would not need to deny that many Americans have powerful commitments to different and conflicting moral and political values; all he would need to show is that the commitment to liberal principles is powerful enough that at some point most protagonists will want to hold onto them in some form. Then there is an opening for critical argument.

Things, however, are more complex. Although Walzer has written that the task of social criticism is to "touch the conscience," he has a more ambitious concrete agenda than just that. He wants to advocate substantive political courses of action beyond noting and rubbing our noses in the ways in which we violate our own professed principles. In Spheres of Justice

and elsewhere he advocates concrete positions on questions ranging from the allocation of medical care, the purposes of education, and the use of quotas as remedial devices to the necessity for limiting the social and political power of money. Indeed, most of Spheres of Justice is devoted to arguing for a particular division of social goods along with particular distributive principles. But the question still remains: why is one set of distributive principles to be adopted over others that are also arguably consistent with conventional meanings? Why should we accept Walzer's contention, for example, that the purpose of the sphere of education is to prepare children for democratic citizenship, rather than for enlightenment or excellence (Walzer 1983a: 197–226)? Surely the latter values are at least as strongly represented as the former in our political culture. Put differently, we can accept Walzer's claim that for justice or equality to be realized they must be implied in our conventional behavior, that if a just society "isn't already here—hidden, as it were, in our concepts and categories—we will never know it concretely or realize it in fact" (ibid.: xiv), and still believe that many possible, perhaps mutually contradictory, distributive practices are hidden in our concepts and categories. To say that ought entails can is only partly to finesse the fact/value problem: it delimits what we can advocate to the realm of the possible, but within that realm it does not tell us what to advocate. Unless we want to embrace some Hegelian notion that there is a unique logical next step in social evolution somehow implied in the last (which Walzer surely does not), why pick one substantive position over the available alternatives? Why should we, in the industrial sphere, "enlist liberal artfulness in the service of socialism" (Walzer 1984a: 318), rather than one of the other possible causes in which it might be enlisted? Unless we want to take the view that there is only one possible way for market economies to evolve, only one set of practices consistent with liberal premises (in which case there would not be much point in advocating anything), we need to know why what Walzer advocates is better, to be preferred. On this point Walzer has not responded adequately to Dworkin's critique, even if he is right that Dworkin's solution fails too. Choices present themselves in political life that are unavoidable and inevitably controversial. Several of the things we might do about the distribution of medical care, several of the policies we might consider for abolishing racism can be argued to be consistent with the meanings of the relevant moral and political vocabularies. Different interpretations of the meanings will benefit different groups differently, and in advancing one position over others the social critic is making a choice, however implicitly.

In short, Walzer's claim that his own method of argument is superior

to the "view from nowhere," which latter can at best generate a "minimal code" that will not resolve concrete moral and political dilemmas, breaks down. His own view is vulnerable in just the same way. It is indeterminate not only in the sense he explicitly embraces—that we should not expect solutions to moral dilemmas to be permanent—but also in the stronger sense that it will not even generate provisional solutions or "temporary stopping points" (Walzer 1987: 49) in moral and political disputes. To appeal to conventional meanings in a world where these are inevitably competing and conflicting will not resolve moral arguments without some additional premises that will allow for adjudication among those conflicting meanings. In short, the commitment to connected criticism does not tell the critic what to say.

(iii) The Situation of the Critic

Two difficulties arise concerning Walzer's discussion of the necessity for the social critic's being connected to the community she criticizes. Remember that Walzer reformulated Camus's remark about being a supporter of justice but not at the cost of his mother's life by saying that a conception of justice that has no room for love is inadequate as a conception of justice . For Walzer, our conception of justice must have room in it for our affective commitments, our feelings for "parents, friends, familiar places, warm memories," and social criticism that ignores or openly scoffs at these seems both cowardly and irrelevant. We must be who we are. Even if the community to which the critic belongs is "historically in the wrong," she should not simply repudiate it and deny the legitimacy of its members' claims.

This argument can be interpreted two ways, one tactical and one normative. The tactical interpretation is that if a social critic wants to convince the relevant community of her claim, she must accept that community and be known to accept it authentically. If a critic's respect for her community is valued by her group, this gives her moral leverage. A difficulty with this argument is that if her fellows know that her commitment is unconditional, how can she have any leverage with them? Surely the authentic emotional commitment to a group can be effective only if the group values that commitment, perhaps in some way depends on it, and if there is some realistic possibility that the commitment might be withdrawn. If people who are reluctant to change their ways know that when the chips are down they can count on her support, it is hard to see how her position is tactically strong. If they know she will never decide they have gone too far, they may not take account of her views at all. One only has to think of Israel's willful disregard of much American opinion about its

policies in the West Bank between 1987 and 1989. Our children may legitimately expect unconditional commitment from us until they are able to take responsibility for their own actions, but no one else, and certainly no political cause, merits the critical abdication it requires. In Walzer's terms, the critic should exploit her connections, not her disconnections, but connections cannot be exploited to much advantage if there is no realistic possibility of disconnection.

This aside, the tactical interpretation of Walzer's claim assumes a particular view of political change and conflict that, as I suggest in section II(i) above, might well be atypical. If we think of situations of irreconcilable conflict or if we think that most significant distributive conflicts are zero-sum or that there is no uncontroversial way to allocate a surplus, it may be a hopeless tactical proposition to say that the effective route to change is immanent criticism of the dominant or ascendant group. Taking account of the dominant group's interests by definition may mean refusing to take account of some other groups' interests, and in these circumstances the critic will have to make her choice. This will in general be true when conflicting groups have staked out mutually exclusive claims to any finite resource. To hold onto the view that our conception of justice must under no circumstances lead us to renounce our emotional ties and bonds may reduce, in this situation, to the proposition that our conception of justice is nothing more than those ties and bonds.

Whether or not these issues can be resolved, they do not capture all of what Walzer wants to say about the affective relationship between the social critic and the community to which she belongs. It is clear from his discussions of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Foucault that Walzer thinks there is something reprehensible about disconnected social criticism, in addition to its being ineffective. He clearly wants to resurrect Camus for the democratic left and to establish that he was courageous in a way that Sartre and de Beauvoir were not. They took the easy way out by disconnecting from the pied noir community and taking an "ideologically flattened" view of the situation.^[19] Yet there is a deep difficulty here for Walzer if he is simultaneously appealing to our affective commitments and making critical judgments about the behavior of Sartre, de Beauvoir, or anyone else. Affective commitments are nothing if they are not authentic; we can go along with a position we do not like because we are convinced that it is justified, that good reasons can be given for it, or that someone we care about wants it. But we cannot feel a commitment on these grounds; we

[19] Indeed, one might go further and say that for Sartre, at least, it was—within his own terms—a hypocritical act of existential "bad faith" to pin his hopes for liberation in Algeria unconditionally on the FLN.

cannot decide to retain an emotional bond that we do not feel. When de Beauvoir declared, following the referendum endorsing de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, that she was no longer a member of the French people, that the results of the referendum "severed the last threads linking me to my country,"^[20] she was describing how she no longer could feel connected. It seems pointless to say that she ought to have felt differently: she felt that way because of who she was. When Sartre saw as his primary bond the French left, rather than any other group with a stake in the Algerian conflict, that was what he felt because of who he was. Or when Walzer complains that Lenin was a bad social critic for "looking at Russia from a great distance and merely disliking" what he saw (Walzer 1987: 63), he is implicitly expecting that Lenin could have been someone other than who he was, which is in tension with the appeal to affective commitments. Had Camus disliked his mother, perhaps his attitude to the pied noir community might have been different, and had he felt no particular tie to them how could we criticize him for this while appealing to affective commitments as the basis for social criticism? In sum, once we appeal to affective connectedness as the basis for social criticism, it seems that valid social criticism is always a unique expression of the particular affective history of the individual social critic. The bonds, or lack of them, the emotional ambivalences, these things all reflect and constitute the social critic's specific history and nature. If we take seriously Walzer's injunction to be ourselves, then all social criticism is necessarily radically individual. One might even argue that this view of social criticism tells us more about the social critic, and about her emotional and psychological propensities and affiliations, than about the practices or structures she attacks. Indeed, we might be tempted to think of her criticism more as autobiography than as what is traditionally thought of as argument, so decisively is it tied to her unique experiences and identity.

III. Conclusion

The weaknesses of Walzer's account, then, are that it fails to supply us with a satisfying picture of the nature of political disagreement and that it evades the issue of the critic's own normative agenda and how that relates to choice among conflicting possibilities in a given situation. In addition, Walzer's account of the affective basis for social criticism raises difficulties for the tactical and normative cases he wants to advance. Indeed, when followed to its logical conclusion, his account seems to threaten our capacity to evaluate social criticism as argument (rather than autobiography) at

[20] Quoted in Walzer (1984b: 426).

all. In chapter 9 I develop an alternative view of social criticism to Walzer's, which I describe as principled criticism . It rests on agreement with Walzer about the disutility of ex cathedra moral argument, but I argue for a different way of giving it up. Note, for now, that Walzer conflates the distinction between universality and particularity in moral argument with the unrelated distinction between the emotional connectedness or disconnectedness of the social critic. It is possible to be a particularist with respect to the first of these distinctions, to believe that general moral and social theories should be eschewed because they invariably fail and are pernicious in a variety of ways, but to hold at the same time that the feelings and motivations of the social critic are irrelevant to the moral content of her social criticism. I will argue that this latter is the superior view.