Spheres of Justice develops a theory of “complex equality” grounded in the social meanings of different goods. Walzer rejects the idea that a single universal principle (such as utility or primary goods) should govern all distributions. Instead, he claims that societies recognize multiple “spheres” of justice—such as health care, education, political power, money, and welfare—each structured by its own internal principles of distribution. Justice requires preventing “dominance,” where control over one good (like money or office) is converted into unfair advantage across other spheres. The work combines normative argument with rich historical and cross‑cultural examples to defend a pluralist, contextualist egalitarianism.

At a Glance

Quick Facts

Author: Michael Walzer
Composed: Late 1970s–1982
Language: English
Status: original survives

Key Arguments

•Pluralism of distributive principles: There is no single, overarching principle of distributive justice; different social goods have distinct social meanings that generate different, sphere-specific distributive criteria (need, desert, free exchange, citizenship, etc.).
•Complex equality: Justice is best understood not as strict material equality but as “complex equality,” where the possession of one good does not confer dominance or control over the distribution of other goods; inequalities within spheres are acceptable if they do not translate into overarching social hierarchy.
•Social meaning and cultural particularism: The meaning of goods is historically and culturally specific; just distributions must be interpreted internally, in light of a political community’s shared understandings, rather than imposed by an abstract, universal metric of value.
•Rejection of monism and simple equality: Utilitarianism, Rawlsian primary goods, and market libertarianism are criticized for treating goods as if they were commensurable and for allowing one distributive logic—often the market or a single set of principles—to govern all areas of social life.
•Political community and democratic sovereignty: Decisions about distributive justice properly belong to self-governing communities; outsiders may criticize egregious injustice, but the primary authority over the interpretation of goods and the rules of distribution lies with democratic citizens themselves.

Historical Significance

The book helped shape the communitarian critique of liberalism and established “complex equality” and “spheres of justice” as enduring concepts in political theory. It provided one of the most influential arguments for contextual, culturally situated accounts of justice and has been central to discussions of welfare policy, health care distribution, affirmative action, and the limits of commodification. Walzer’s approach influenced later work on multiculturalism, global justice, and the ethics of markets, and it remains a key reference point in debates between universalists and particularists in moral and political philosophy.

Famous Passages

Definition of complex equality(Chapter 2, early sections (approximately pp. 19–21 in the 1983 Basic Books edition).)

Example of money corrupting other spheres (buying political office, education, and honors)(Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, discussion of dominance and conversion of goods (approximately pp. 3–5, 19–26).)

Analysis of health care as a distinct sphere(Chapter 4: Health Care (approximately pp. 86–105).)

Discussion of political power and citizenship as social goods(Chapter 6: Political Power (approximately pp. 151–187).)

Critique of Rawls and the idea of a single metric of justice(Primarily in Chapter 1 and the early chapters, especially the critical discussions of monistic theories (approximately pp. 5–18, 65–75).)

Key Terms

Spheres of justice: Distinct domains of social life (such as health, education, money, or political power) within which particular principles and practices of distribution are appropriate.

Complex [equality](/topics/equality/): A condition in which advantages in one sphere do not translate into dominance in others, so that no single good becomes the master key to all social benefits.

Simple equality: The idea that justice requires roughly identical shares of social goods for everyone, which Walzer criticizes as both unrealistic and inattentive to the diverse meanings of goods.

Social meanings: Shared understandings, historically and culturally formed, that give specific goods their significance and help determine the appropriate principles for distributing them.

Dominance: The unjust situation in which control over one type of good (such as money or office) is converted into disproportionate power over [other](/terms/other/) goods and spheres.

Conversion of goods: The process through which possession of a good in one sphere (like wealth) is used to gain advantages in a different sphere (such as political power or education).

Membership: Belonging to a political community or association, understood as a primary good whose distribution structures access to many other social goods.

[Pluralism](/terms/pluralism/) (distributive pluralism): Walzer’s view that multiple, non-reducible principles of justice operate in different spheres, rather than a single, universal rule of distribution.

[Contextualism](/schools/contextualism/): A methodological stance holding that judgments about justice must be rooted in the specific historical and cultural context of a community’s shared meanings.

Monism (in distributive justice): Any theory that treats a single principle or metric—such as utility, welfare, or primary goods—as sufficient to govern the distribution of all social goods.

Limits of commodification: The normative boundaries Walzer defends around the market, specifying goods (like political office or love) that should not be bought or sold.

Office: Positions of authority or responsibility in public and professional life, which Walzer argues should be allocated according to competence, merit, and fair procedures.

Need-based distribution: A principle of justice according to which certain goods, especially welfare and health care, should be allocated on the basis of individuals’ needs rather than market success.

Desert (merit): A distributive principle that allocates certain goods, such as office or honor, according to individuals’ qualifications, achievements, or contributions.

Democratic self-determination: The idea that citizens of a political community have primary authority to interpret the meanings of their social goods and to decide on just distributions within and across spheres.

1. Introduction

Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (1983) is Michael Walzer’s systematic attempt to rethink distributive justice through a pluralist lens. Rather than asking what single principle should govern all distributions, Walzer analyzes how different social goods—such as political power, money, health care, and education—are understood and allocated within particular societies.

At the core of the book stand two linked ideas. First, Walzer introduces the notion of “spheres of justice,” distinct domains of social life, each structured by goods that possess their own social meanings. Second, he develops the ideal of complex equality, a condition in which no one form of advantage (for example, wealth) becomes a “master good” that can be freely converted into superiority in other domains.

Walzer positions his approach against monistic theories of justice—utilitarian, Rawlsian, and libertarian—arguing that they treat diverse goods as if they were commensurable and governed by a single distributive rule or metric. By contrast, he claims that the appropriate principles of distribution (need, desert, free exchange, democratic decision, and others) vary with the meanings of goods in their social contexts.

The work combines normative argument with extensive historical and cross‑cultural examples, from ancient city‑states and medieval guilds to modern welfare states and capitalist markets. Walzer argues that questions of justice are best addressed “from the inside,” by interpreting a community’s shared understandings of its goods, rather than by applying an abstract external theory.

Throughout, Spheres of Justice aims to defend both pluralism—the irreducible diversity of distributive principles—and equality, understood not as simple material leveling but as the prevention of social dominance across spheres.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

Walzer’s book emerged in the early 1980s against the backdrop of intense debate over distributive justice, liberalism, and the role of markets and the state. It is often read as part of, and sometimes as a catalyst for, the so‑called liberal–communitarian debate.

2.1 Context in Political Philosophy

A central point of reference is John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), which proposed a unified framework of principles of justice and primary goods. Many philosophers were working out Rawls’s implications or pressing objections. At the same time:

Trend	Relevance to Spheres of Justice
Rising libertarianism (Nozick, Hayek)	Emphasized property rights and market distributions, which Walzer treats as one limited sphere among many.
Utilitarian and welfare economics traditions	Exemplified monistic, maximization‑oriented approaches Walzer criticizes.
Marxist and neo‑Marxist theory	Focused on exploitation and class, which Walzer partially reframes as problems of dominance across spheres.

Walzer’s emphasis on social meanings intersects with contemporaneous discussions in hermeneutics and interpretive social science, drawing implicitly on thinkers such as Clifford Geertz and Charles Taylor.

The book was written amid debates about the welfare state, economic crisis, and the expansion of markets into new areas of life. Issues such as health‑care provision, educational inequality, and political corruption provided empirical background for Walzer’s concern with limits of commodification and with blocking the conversion of money into political influence or status.

The period also saw intensifying concerns about national identity, immigration, and citizenship. Walzer’s earlier and contemporaneous work on political obligation and membership feeds directly into the first chapters of Spheres of Justice, where membership is treated as a primary social good.

2.3 Place in Ongoing Debates

Commentators often situate Spheres of Justice at a crossroads between:

Liberal egalitarianism, with which it shares an egalitarian concern.
Communitarianism, with which it shares a focus on community and social meanings.
Pluralist theories of value, which reject a single standard of justice.

Later debates on multiculturalism, global justice, and the moral limits of markets frequently treat Walzer’s contextual, sphere‑based approach as a key reference point, whether as a resource or as a foil.

3. Author and Composition

Michael Walzer (b. 1935) is an American political theorist associated with normative political theory, social criticism, and communitarian‑leaning liberal thought. At the time of writing Spheres of Justice, he was already known for works on political obligation and the morality of war, including Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (1970) and Just and Unjust Wars (1977).

3.1 Intellectual Background

Walzer’s training in history and philosophy, combined with engagement in public debate (including contributions to Dissent magazine), shapes the style and method of Spheres of Justice. His approach is influenced by:

Historical and sociological case studies.
Jewish political thought and debates about community.
A critical but sympathetic engagement with liberalism.

These influences contribute to his emphasis on interpretation of social meanings rather than purely abstract theorizing.

3.2 Genesis and Development of the Book

The book was composed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the wake of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and debates over the welfare state and market society. Walzer had been developing ideas about membership, equality, and pluralism in earlier essays; Spheres of Justice systematizes these into a unified treatise.

“We distributive justice theorists are like mapmakers... the territory already exists.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (paraphrased placement early in the book)

This oft‑cited remark captures his self‑understanding: the book is presented as an interpretive map of existing practices of distribution, rather than a blueprint constructed from first principles.

3.3 Publication and Reception Context

Published by Basic Books in 1983 and dedicated to Judith Shklar, Spheres of Justice quickly became a major reference in Anglophone political theory. It is frequently paired with other works in what some have called the “first wave” of communitarian critiques of liberalism, even though Walzer himself has sometimes resisted the communitarian label. The composition period thus coincides with the formulation of broader critiques of abstract liberal individualism and with renewed attention to the moral ontology of communities.

4. Structure and Organization of the Work

Walzer organizes Spheres of Justice as a sequence of thematic chapters, each focused on a particular sphere of social goods and its appropriate distributive principles. The structure itself enacts the book’s pluralist thesis: there is no single master chapter laying down one principle; instead, different domains are analyzed in turn.

4.1 Overall Outline

Chapter focus (approx.)	Central goods	Primary distributive themes
Introduction and theory	Multiple	Spheres, complex equality, critique of monism
Membership	Citizenship, admission	Inclusion, boundaries of community
Security and welfare	Protection, subsistence	Need, communal responsibility
Money and commodities	Wealth, goods	Markets, exchange, limits of purchase
Office	Roles, positions	Merit, procedures, corruption
Hardship and health care	Medical care	Need, vulnerability, professional norms
Education	Schooling, training	Talent, citizenship, equal opportunity
Kinship and love	Family, intimacy	Non‑commodification, personal ties
Political power	Office, votes	Democracy, non‑purchase of power
Recognition, honor, status	Esteem, reputation	Merit, cultural standards
Concluding synthesis	Cross‑sphere relations	Complex equality, anti‑dominance

4.2 Thematic Progression

The book moves from goods that define community boundaries (membership) to those that secure basic needs (security and welfare), then to market goods (money), and onwards to offices, professional services, and formative institutions (education). Later chapters turn to intimacy and recognition, before culminating in a more abstract account of complex equality and dominance.

This arrangement allows Walzer to:

Exemplify his method of interpretative analysis in concrete domains.
Compare and contrast the internal logics of different spheres.
Show how inter‑sphere “conversion” of goods can lead to injustice, setting up the final discussion of complex equality.

The organization therefore mirrors the central claim that justice must be understood as plural and differentiated across domains, rather than derived from a single distributive formula.

5. The Concept of Spheres of Justice

The notion of spheres of justice is Walzer’s way of capturing the idea that social life is differentiated into domains, each with its own goods and distributive norms. A “sphere” is not simply a legal category or sector (like “the economy”); it is a set of social practices and institutions organized around goods that share a characteristic social meaning.

5.1 Definition and Features

Walzer’s spheres are:

Good‑centered: Defined by the goods at stake (e.g., health care, political office, education).
Normatively structured: Each sphere has characteristic principles (need, merit, free exchange, lottery, citizenship) that participants treat as appropriate.
Historically and culturally variable: The boundaries and contents of spheres differ across societies and epochs.

“Different social goods ought to be distributed for different reasons, in accordance with different procedures, by different agents.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (early chapter)

This remark is often taken as a concise statement of what it means for there to be distinct spheres.

5.2 Spheres and Their Boundaries

Walzer identifies multiple spheres—membership, welfare, money and commodities, office, health care, education, kinship and love, political power, recognition and honor, among others. The boundaries between spheres matter because they:

Protect each sphere’s internal principles from intrusion by others.
Prevent a single good or practice (notably money or state power) from colonizing the rest.

Commentators debate how sharply these boundaries can be drawn in practice, but in Walzer’s framework they function as normative fences: cross‑sphere influence is not always illegitimate, but it is suspect when it enables dominance.

5.3 Pluralism of Distributive Principles

The concept of spheres underpins Walzer’s distributive pluralism. Because goods differ in meaning, they rightly fall under different principles of justice. Money may be distributed through market exchange; health care, according to need; office, by merit and procedural fairness; and political power, via democratic choice. The sphere framework thus rejects any claim that justice can be captured by a single, sphere‑transcending rule.

6. Complex Equality and the Prevention of Dominance

Complex equality is Walzer’s central egalitarian ideal, defining what counts as a just relationship among the different spheres of justice. It contrasts with both simple equality (equal shares of everything) and with systems that tolerate the translation of one good into overarching power.

6.1 Definition of Complex Equality

Walzer describes complex equality as a condition in which inequalities within one sphere do not create general social superiority. In such a society:

Individuals may be unequal in wealth, office, or honor.
Yet superiority in one respect does not automatically entitle them to advantages in other spheres.

“No citizen’s standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (approx. Ch. 2)

This formulation captures the goal: to prevent any single good from becoming a “dominant good”.

6.2 Dominance and Conversion of Goods

Dominance arises when control over one good becomes a “master key” to others—for example, when money routinely buys political office, educational opportunity, or honor. Walzer treats such conversion of goods as paradigmatic injustice. Complex equality aims to:

Restrict conversions that undermine the internal logic of a sphere.
Ensure that different distributive principles coexist without being overridden by markets or state power.

6.3 Mechanisms of Prevention

Walzer does not provide a single institutional blueprint, but he points to:

Legal barriers (e.g., banning vote‑buying, corruption, sale of offices).
Institutional design (e.g., professional norms in medicine and education that resist market influence).
Cultural norms (e.g., social disapproval of buying honor or love).

Proponents read complex equality as a way to reconcile pluralism with egalitarianism: justice lies not in leveling all differences, but in blocking their transformation into comprehensive hierarchy. Critics question whether such fences can be maintained and whether complex equality sufficiently addresses inequalities within spheres themselves.

Walzer’s pluralist theory rests on the claim that distributions must be guided by the social meanings of goods as understood within specific communities. This orientation is often labeled contextualism.

Social meanings are the shared understandings, norms, and narratives through which a community interprets its goods. For Walzer, a hospital, a university, or a medal for bravery are not mere objects; they are embedded in practices that give them significance and help determine what counts as a just distribution.

Aspect of social meaning	Example (schematic)
Symbolic significance	A vote as an expression of political equality, not a tradable asset.
Role expectations	Medical care as a response to vulnerability, shaping need‑based distribution.
Historical narratives	Citizenship shaped by stories of founding, migration, or conquest.

7.2 Contextualism About Justice

Walzer’s contextualism holds that judgments of justice should be derived from these internal meanings rather than imposed by a universal, external metric. He thus treats political philosophy as a form of interpretation:

“We look for the meanings of social goods in the shared understandings of the people whose lives are structured by those goods.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (paraphrased methodological claim)

Different societies may therefore legitimately embody different principles of distribution for the “same” nominal good, because the good’s meaning is not identical across contexts.

7.3 Tensions and Interpretive Disagreement

Walzer acknowledges that social meanings are:

Contested within communities.
Historical, subject to change.
Sometimes in tension with egalitarian aspirations.

Supporters see contextualism as respecting cultural diversity and democratic self‑determination. Critics worry that reliance on existing meanings may entrench injustice or limit cross‑cultural critique. Later sections of the entry (on criticism and legacy) explore these debates; here it suffices to note that for Walzer, spheres, meanings, and context are inseparable: each sphere’s distributive principles express its culturally embedded meaning.

8. Analysis of Key Spheres: Membership, Welfare, and Money

Walzer treats membership, security and welfare, and money and commodities as foundational spheres whose arrangements strongly shape the rest of social life.

8.1 Membership

Membership—belonging to a political community—is described as a “primary good” because it conditions access to many other goods (welfare, education, political rights). Walzer argues that:

Communities have some right to control admission (immigration, naturalization).
Existing members have strong claims to non‑expulsion and to inclusion in collective decisions.

The appropriate principles here reflect shared understandings of political community, such as descent, territorial presence, or participation. He resists the idea of a universal right to free movement that would override communal self‑determination, while also noting that membership decisions have deep moral significance.

8.2 Security and Welfare

In the sphere of security and welfare, the central goods are physical protection, subsistence, and basic social support. Walzer maintains that:

The primary distributive principle is need.
Provision is understood as a form of communal responsibility and solidarity.

“The poor are not merely unfortunate; they are our fellow citizens, and their needs are claims upon us.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (paraphrased thematic point)

He criticizes both minimalist, laissez‑faire approaches that leave welfare to markets and overly bureaucratic systems that obscure the moral relationship between giver and receiver. Examples from ancient poor relief, religious charity, and modern welfare states illustrate varied social meanings of need and responsibility.

8.3 Money and Commodities

The sphere of money and commodities is where market exchange operates legitimately, according to principles of free agreement, price, and contract. Walzer accepts the value of markets for certain goods, but insists that:

Money should not buy access to spheres whose goods have incompatible meanings (e.g., political power, citizenship, love).
Even within the commodity sphere, there may be goods whose sale is restricted or regulated.

Within-sphere norm	Cross-sphere limit
Prices allocate ordinary consumer goods.	Votes, public office, and personal relationships should not be for sale.

Walzer’s treatment of money thus exemplifies his broader concern that one sphere—here, the market—must be contained to prevent dominance over others.

9. Analysis of Key Spheres: Office, Health Care, and Education

Walzer devotes separate chapters to office, health care, and education, treating them as spheres where specialized norms and professional roles shape appropriate distributions.

9.1 Office

The sphere of office concerns positions of authority and responsibility in public and professional life. Walzer argues that offices should be allocated according to:

Competence and merit (qualifications, skills, performance).
Procedural fairness (transparent selection, non‑discrimination).

He condemns patronage, nepotism, and corruption as ways in which wealth or social connections improperly influence this sphere. Selling offices or distributing them as favors represents an illegitimate conversion of money or kinship into political power or status, violating the sphere’s internal meaning of office as a public trust.

9.2 Hardship and Health Care

In the chapter on hardship and health care, Walzer treats medical care as paradigmatically governed by need and vulnerability, not by ability to pay. Health care’s social meaning, he suggests, is tied to:

Responding to illness and suffering.
Upholding professional ethics of care.

“The sick and injured have a claim that arises from their condition, not from their social or economic standing.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (paraphrased)

Accordingly, he is critical of systems where access to care is heavily dependent on wealth or employment status. Yet he also notes that actual institutions reflect mixed principles (need, market mechanisms, bureaucratic rules), raising questions about how to align them more closely with the sphere’s dominant meaning.

9.3 Education

Education is portrayed as a formative good: it shapes individuals’ capacities, character, and civic identity. Walzer identifies several competing principles:

Talent and effort: Justifying differentiated schooling or tracking.
Equal citizenship: Supporting a common educational core and limits on buying advantage.
Family and community autonomy: Informing parental choice and cultural transmission.

He argues that unrestrained purchase of educational advantage (through private schooling, tutoring, or donations) risks turning wealth into an enduring multi‑sphere advantage, undermining both complex equality and democratic citizenship. At the same time, education’s internal plural aims—professional training, cultural reproduction, civic formation—make its sphere particularly complex and contested.

10. Intimacy, Recognition, and the Limits of Commodification

Walzer’s analysis extends to spheres in which intimacy and recognition are central, highlighting domains where commodification is especially controversial.

10.1 Kinship and Love

In the sphere of kinship and love, the primary goods include marital relationships, parental ties, and friendships. Walzer emphasizes that:

These goods are constituted by affection, commitment, and personal history.
They are not appropriately allocated by money or bureaucratic assignment.

Practices such as buying and selling spouses, arranged marriages enforced by payment, or commodified forms of surrogacy (in some interpretations) are cited as examples where market logic threatens to distort the social meaning of intimate relationships. For Walzer, the very identity of love and family bonds depends on their being non‑market relations.

In the chapter on recognition, honor, and status, Walzer analyzes how societies allocate esteem. Honors, titles, and reputations are seen as responses to perceived achievement, virtue, or contribution, as interpreted through cultural standards.

“Honor is a social good, but one that is not rightly bought, only bestowed.”

— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (paraphrased idea)

He criticizes arrangements where honors can be purchased (for example, through large donations or political favoritism), regarding this as an illegitimate intrusion of money or power into a sphere that should track merit and social meaning, however contested those may be.

10.3 Limits of Commodification

Across intimacy and recognition, Walzer develops a general view about the limits of commodification:

Some goods lose their very character when bought or sold (love, friendship).
Others are corrupted when commodified (honors, certain artistic or religious roles).
Still others may be legitimately traded but within regulated limits.

Supporters of Walzer draw on these analyses to argue that markets must be ethically bounded. Later authors (such as Debra Satz and Michael Sandel) develop and refine these themes, sometimes critiquing or extending Walzer’s distinction between spheres that permit market exchange and those that resist it.

11. Philosophical Method: Interpretation and Justification

Walzer’s philosophical method in Spheres of Justice is distinctive for its interpretive and contextual character. He positions himself neither as a purely empirical sociologist nor as a constructor of ideal theories, but as an interpreter of shared social meanings.

Walzer presents political theory as “interpretive social criticism”:

The theorist starts from existing practices and understandings.
Through comparison, reflection, and argument, she uncovers implicit principles of justice.
These internal standards can then be used to criticize inconsistency, hypocrisy, or domination within a society.

“We criticize our own society in the name of the values we already hold.”

— Michael Walzer, associated method, elaborated in Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987), which clarifies the approach taken in Spheres of Justice

Although this later work is separate, commentators widely read Spheres of Justice as a prime exhibit of the same method.

11.2 Justification “From the Inside”

Walzer’s justification of distributive principles proceeds “from the inside”:

He looks to the self‑understandings of democratic citizens.
He claims that the principles appropriate to each sphere are those that best interpret these understandings.
Justification is thus largely interpretive and hermeneutic, rather than deduced from abstract rational choice or utility maximization.

This does not mean simply endorsing whatever norms exist; rather, Walzer treats practices as texts that can support more or less faithful, more or less egalitarian interpretations.

11.3 Comparison with Ideal Theory

Many readers contrast Walzer’s method with Rawlsian “ideal theory” or with utilitarian calculation. Where those approaches seek universal principles or maximizing rules, Walzer:

Accepts pluralism of principles across spheres.
Focuses on thick descriptions of goods and institutions.
Allows for cross‑societal comparison, but typically by exploring analogies and differences in meaning rather than by applying one evaluative metric.

Advocates view this as a more realistic, culturally sensitive mode of justification. Critics question whether it yields sufficiently determinate guidance or robust grounds for condemning entrenched injustices.

12. Engagement with Liberalism and Rawls

Walzer’s engagement with liberalism and with John Rawls is central to the argumentative framework of Spheres of Justice. He positions his view both as a continuation of and a challenge to liberal egalitarian thought.

12.1 Critique of Monistic Liberal Theories

Walzer criticizes what he takes to be liberalism’s tendency toward monism—the search for a single distributive principle or metric. He contrasts his pluralist approach with:

Utilitarianism, which aggregates preferences or welfare.
Market liberalism, which prioritizes voluntary exchange and property.
Some interpretations of Rawlsian liberalism, which rely on a unified list of primary goods and a small set of general principles.

He argues that such theories risk flattening the qualitative differences among goods and spheres.

12.2 Dialogue with Rawls

Rawls is Walzer’s most explicit interlocutor. The comparison is multi‑faceted:

Issue	Rawls (as interpreted by Walzer)	Walzer’s response
Basic structure	A unified scheme governed by two principles.	Multiple spheres, each with distinct norms.
Currency of justice	Primary goods (rights, opportunities, income, wealth, etc.).	Diverse goods with distinct meanings; no single metric.
Method	Hypothetical contract behind a veil of ignorance.	Interpretive reconstruction of shared social meanings.

Walzer acknowledges deep affinities with Rawls’s egalitarian aims and his emphasis on basic liberties. Yet he contends that even Rawls’s plural list of primary goods treats them as commensurable and governed by the same overall principles, whereas Spheres of Justice insists on incommensurable, sphere‑specific standards.

12.3 Liberalism, Freedom, and Community

Walzer’s work is often read as a critique from within liberalism. He defends:

Individual rights and protections.
Democratic self‑government.
The importance of limiting arbitrary power.

At the same time, he emphasizes the constitutive role of communities and shared meanings, diverging from more individualistic variants of liberalism. Some commentators classify him as a communitarian, while others see him as advancing a contextual liberalism that reshapes rather than abandons the liberal tradition.

13. Relation to Communitarianism and Pluralism

Spheres of Justice figures prominently in discussions of communitarianism and value pluralism, although Walzer’s alignment with these labels is contested.

13.1 Communitarian Themes

The book shares several themes with communitarian critics of liberalism (such as Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre):

Emphasis on embedded selves situated in communities.
Focus on historical traditions and practices.
Skepticism toward highly abstract, decontextualized principles.

Walzer’s insistence that justice must reflect a community’s shared understandings and that membership is a fundamental good resonates with communitarian concerns about the importance of political and cultural belonging.

13.2 Distinctive Features vis‑à‑vis Communitarianism

Nonetheless, Walzer diverges from some communitarian positions:

He retains a strong egalitarian and anti‑domination emphasis.
He does not propose a return to a single thick tradition, but rather accepts pluralism among and within communities.
He frequently appeals to democratic deliberation as the locus of authority for interpreting social meanings.

Some scholars therefore describe him as a “liberal communitarian” or a contextual egalitarian, signaling both overlap and difference.

13.3 Distributive and Value Pluralism

Walzer’s theory also connects with broader ideas of pluralism:

Distributive pluralism: Multiple irreducible principles of justice (need, desert, exchange, etc.) operate in different spheres.
Value pluralism: Social goods and moral values are diverse and not fully commensurable.

Proponents of pluralist political theory (including Isaiah Berlin in a different register) find in Walzer a rich account of how institutions embody this diversity. Critics worry that strong pluralism complicates decision‑making when spheres conflict or when social meanings are deeply divided.

Overall, Spheres of Justice is commonly regarded as a key effort to articulate a pluralist, community‑embedded egalitarianism, sitting at the crossroads of liberal and communitarian thought.

14. Major Criticisms and Debates

The reception of Spheres of Justice has been marked by extensive critical debate. Commentators have raised questions about the determinacy, normativity, and scope of Walzer’s theory.

14.1 Conservatism and Endorsing the Status Quo

One major criticism holds that grounding justice in existing social meanings risks conservatism. If shared understandings are themselves oppressive—e.g., gendered norms, caste hierarchies, racist traditions—then interpreting and reinforcing them may seem to legitimate injustice. Critics such as some feminist and critical theorists argue that Walzer provides insufficient resources for radical critique or for justifying transformative struggles.

Defenders reply that Walzer’s method allows for internal criticism: marginalized groups can appeal to a society’s own professed values (e.g., equality, dignity) to challenge inconsistent or exclusionary meanings.

14.2 Vagueness of Spheres and Boundaries

Another line of objection concerns the vagueness and fluidity of spheres. Critics ask:

How many spheres are there, and on what basis are they individuated?
How do we decide whether a particular good (e.g., higher education) belongs to one sphere or straddles several?

Skeptics contend that without clear criteria, the notion of spheres cannot reliably guide institutional design or adjudicate disputes about cross‑sphere conversions. Some defenders answer that this indeterminacy reflects social reality and that spheres are heuristic tools for public reasoning, not precise taxonomic entities.

14.3 Lack of Universal Standards and Global Justice

Cosmopolitan theorists and human rights advocates raise concerns about Walzer’s reluctance to endorse strong universal standards. They worry that his contextualism undercuts firm condemnation of practices like systematic gender discrimination, authoritarian rule, or exploitation, especially in non‑liberal societies.

Additionally, Walzer’s focus on bounded political communities has been criticized as state‑centric. In an era of globalization, transnational markets, and global inequality, many argue that justice must extend beyond national borders more robustly than Spheres of Justice allows.

14.4 Tension with Egalitarianism

Some egalitarian critics argue that complex equality tolerates significant economic inequality so long as formal barriers prevent dominance across spheres. They contend that:

Economic inequality can itself be undermining of status, self‑respect, and real opportunities, even without overt conversion.
Informal mechanisms (social networks, cultural capital) allow wealth to influence other spheres in ways Walzer may underplay.

Supporters respond that Walzer’s focus on dominance captures the most troubling features of inequality and that more stringent leveling may conflict with pluralism and freedom. The ongoing debate concerns how to balance pluralism, equality, and anti‑domination in practice.

15. Applications: Welfare State, Health Care, and Markets

Walzer’s framework has been widely applied to debates over the welfare state, health care, and the regulation of markets. While Spheres of Justice itself offers case‑focused discussions rather than detailed policy prescriptions, its concepts have informed subsequent normative analyses.

In discussions of the welfare state, commentators use Walzer’s notion of security and welfare as a distinct sphere to argue that:

Welfare benefits should track need and social membership, not prior market success.
Policies should be designed to prevent welfare provision from turning into either charity that stigmatizes or bureaucratic domination.

Debates over basic income, conditionality, and workfare often draw implicitly or explicitly on Walzer’s emphasis on the moral meaning of mutual aid among citizens.

15.2 Health Care Systems

Walzer’s analysis of health care as governed by need and professional norms has influenced discussions of:

Universal health coverage and right to health care.
The ethics of two‑tier systems, where private payment buys faster or superior access.
Priority setting and rationing in public health.

Proponents of egalitarian and rights‑based approaches to health care sometimes cite Walzer in support of limiting the role of markets and private wealth in determining access. Others use his emphasis on professional ethics to argue for strong institutional safeguards against commodification within health systems.

15.3 Regulation of Markets and Limits of Commodification

Walzer’s account of the money and commodities sphere and his insistence on limits of commodification have been taken up in debates over:

Privatization of public services (education, prisons, security).
The sale of bodily goods (organs, reproductive services).
Campaign finance, lobbying, and the purchase of political influence.

Policy area	Walzerian concern
Campaign finance	Preventing money’s conversion into political power.
Education markets	Avoiding hereditary advantage via purchasable schooling.
Organ sales	Preserving the meaning of bodily integrity and need-based care.

Later theorists, such as Debra Satz, have developed more fine‑grained analyses of “noxious markets,” often building on or revising Walzer’s sphere‑based distinctions. Across these applications, Spheres of Justice serves as a resource for thinking about when and why market allocation is inappropriate and how welfare and health institutions should express social solidarity.

16. Legacy and Historical Significance

Spheres of Justice has had a lasting impact on political theory, social philosophy, and applied ethics. Its concepts of spheres, complex equality, and social meanings continue to shape debates about justice and pluralism.

16.1 Influence in Political Theory

The book is widely regarded as a foundational text in:

The communitarian turn, alongside works by Sandel and Taylor.
Contextualist approaches to political philosophy.
Pluralist theories of justice that resist monistic metrics.

It has generated extensive secondary literature, including both sympathetic elaborations and sharp critiques, and remains a standard reference in discussions of distributive justice, especially in graduate curricula.

16.2 Contributions to Debates on Markets and Commodification

Walzer’s insistence on the moral limits of markets has influenced later work in political philosophy, law, and economics. Authors exploring whether certain goods should be for sale—such as organs, votes, or educational places—often engage with his argument that distinct social meanings can render market allocation inappropriate.

His distinction between spheres has also entered public discourse indirectly, shaping arguments for campaign finance reform, universal health care, and protections against the commercialization of intimate life.

16.3 Role in Discussions of Multiculturalism and Global Justice

In debates over multiculturalism, Walzer’s focus on membership and community boundaries has been both influential and contested. The idea that justice is interpreted within historical communities informs later discussions of minority rights, national self‑determination, and immigration.

Regarding global justice, many see Spheres of Justice as an important, if limited, contribution. Its primarily state‑centered framework has prompted subsequent theorists to address how spheres and complex equality might operate transnationally, in a world of global markets and institutions.

16.4 Ongoing Relevance

Decades after publication, Spheres of Justice continues to be cited in:

Philosophical scholarship on egalitarianism and pluralism.
Interdisciplinary studies of welfare, health, and education policy.
Ethical debates on market expansion and commodification.

Its legacy lies less in providing a fixed template for institutions than in offering a conceptual vocabulary—spheres, complex equality, social meanings—that continues to frame how scholars and practitioners think about the plural, contested nature of justice in modern societies.

Study Guide

intermediate

The work assumes some familiarity with political philosophy and debates about distributive justice, but it is less technically dense than many advanced texts. The main challenges are grasping the pluralist structure of the argument, tracking multiple spheres and their internal logics, and appreciating the methodological claim about social meanings and contextualism.

Key Concepts to Master

Spheres of justice

Distinct domains of social life (such as membership, welfare, money, office, health care, education, love, political power, recognition) within which specific goods are distributed according to principles appropriate to their social meanings.

Complex equality

A condition in which inequalities within particular spheres are tolerated so long as advantages in one sphere do not translate into overarching dominance in others; no single good becomes a ‘master key’ to all social benefits.

Dominance and conversion of goods

Dominance is the situation in which control over one type of good (e.g., money) confers illegitimate power in other spheres. Conversion of goods is the process through which advantages in one domain (like wealth) are used to obtain goods that should be governed by different principles (such as political office or honor).

Social meanings

The historically and culturally formed shared understandings that give goods (like votes, offices, medical care, or family ties) their significance and help determine what distributive principles are appropriate to them.

Pluralism (distributive pluralism)

The view that multiple, irreducible principles of justice—such as need, desert, free exchange, citizenship, and lottery—properly govern different spheres, rather than a single, overarching principle or currency.

Contextualism and democratic self-determination

Contextualism is the stance that judgments about justice must be rooted in a community’s specific history and shared understandings. Democratic self-determination is the idea that citizens collectively have primary authority to interpret the meanings of their goods and set distributive rules.

Limits of commodification

Normative boundaries that restrict the reach of markets, specifying goods (e.g., political power, love, citizenship, certain honors) that should not be bought or sold because commodification would distort or destroy their social meanings.

Discussion Questions

What does Walzer mean by ‘spheres of justice’, and how does this framework challenge the idea that a single principle (such as utility or primary goods) can govern all distributions?

Explain the idea of complex equality. Can a society with large income inequalities still be just in Walzer’s sense if strong barriers prevent money from influencing other spheres?

How does Walzer’s notion of social meanings shape his view of just distributions in spheres such as health care and political power?

To what extent does Walzer’s contextualism risk entrenching unjust practices rooted in discriminatory social meanings (for example, gendered or racial norms)?

Compare Walzer’s and Rawls’s approaches to distributive justice. In what ways are they aiming at similar egalitarian goals, and where do their methods and conceptual frameworks diverge?

How persuasive is Walzer’s argument for limits of commodification in spheres such as education, kinship, and honor? Are there cases where market mechanisms might be compatible with, or even enhance, the social meanings of these goods?

Can Walzer’s framework of spheres and complex equality be extended to questions of global justice (e.g., global health, migration, climate policy), or is it inherently tied to bounded national communities?

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APA Style (7th Edition)

Philopedia. (2025). spheres-of-justice-a-defense-of-pluralism-and-equality. Philopedia. https://philopedia.com/works/spheres-of-justice-a-defense-of-pluralism-and-equality/

MLA Style (9th Edition)

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Chicago Style (17th Edition)

Philopedia. "spheres-of-justice-a-defense-of-pluralism-and-equality." Philopedia. Accessed December 11, 2025. https://philopedia.com/works/spheres-of-justice-a-defense-of-pluralism-and-equality/.

BibTeX

@online{philopedia_spheres_of_justice_a_defense_of_pluralism_and_equality,
  title = {spheres-of-justice-a-defense-of-pluralism-and-equality},
  author = {Philopedia},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://philopedia.com/works/spheres-of-justice-a-defense-of-pluralism-and-equality/},
  urldate = {December 11, 2025}
}