Defending the community, never forgetting the face of the other

"The basic assumption of almost all philosophers who, from Plato onwards, have dealt with justice," writes Michael Walzer in the first pages of his Spheres of Justice, "is that there is one and only one distributive system that philosophy can rightly accept. Today, this system is usually defined as the one that ideals and rational individuals would choose if they were forced to make an impartial choice, knowing nothing about their personal situation and excluding particularistic demands (...) But what is this conclusion worth? It is doubtful,' the philosopher continues, 'that those same individuals would repeat that hypothetical choice or even recognise it as their own once they became ordinary people with a strong sense of their own identity, in possession of their own possessions and grappling with everyday problems. The most important problem,' writes Walzer, 'is not the particularism of interests (...) The most important problem is the particularism of history, culture and belonging (...) Justice is a human construction,' he concludes, 'and there is not necessarily only one way to achieve it' (p. 5). Here is the point. Justice is a human construction and cannot be fully understood only through the abstraction of reason or the fiction of the social contract. The protagonists of these abstract visions - the members of liberal society - "do not share political or religious traditions; they can only tell one story about themselves and that is the story of creation, which begins in the state of nature or the original position. Each individual imagines himself absolutely free, unconstrained and on his own, and enters society, accepting its obligations, only to minimise risks. His goal is security and security is, as Marx wrote, 'the guarantee of his egoism'. And as he imagines himself, so he is in reality, that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, completely preoccupied with his private interest and acting according to his private whim (...). The only link between men is natural necessity, need and the private sphere' ('The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism'. Political Theory 18, pp. 6-23, 1990). The individual protagonist of classical liberalism is thought of as an autonomous, disembodied subject, capable of rationally choosing his own ends. But for Walzer, this image is incomplete, if not misleading. For every human being is actually born in a web of relationships, wrapped in a fabric of meanings that precedes every act of the will. Identity is rooted. It is history. It is inheritance. Real people are people 'situated' in a common space made up of language, memory and shared values. It is in this space that our ideas of justice are also born and are, therefore, inherently local. There is no universal definition to apply everywhere: there is only the interpretation that each community knows how to give, through its stories and voices. This is the root of the approach to ethical and political problems that Walzer developed together with other thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel that goes by the name of 'communitarianism'. But unlike the latter authors, Walzer does not understand communitarianism as an alternative perspective to liberalism. In his recent The Struggle for a Decent Politics (Yale University Press, 2023) he discusses among the other forms of liberalism also that of 'liberal communitarians'. He simply starts from the distinction between a 'thin' liberalism, based on universal and abstract principles, and a 'thick' liberalism, rooted in the practices and values of concrete communities. In this sense, his approach can be described as a form of moral realism. A kind of grammar of social life that bases the idea of justice on what people actually believe to be right in the context of their culture, knowing that these beliefs are social constructions, sometimes even contradictory and above all never general. Walzer moves within this world, not above it. In his vision, the individual is never an abstract point: he is always a child of a place, a lexicon, a tradition because we are what we are by virtue of the communities in which we live and the traditions we inherit.

Identity, in this sense, is never an individual achievement, but rather a collective affair. It is therefore in communities that we learn what it means to be just, courageous, free. There are communities we voluntarily choose to join - such as political parties and movements - and other communities in which we are simply born. "I have never chosen to be an American or a Jew," Walzer writes in The Struggle for a Decent Politics, "certainly not as I have chosen to be a member of the Democratic Party, the American Political Science Association, or the Society for the Elimination of Bad Philosophy. Community, then, is not just a rationally chosen space, but a constitutive dimension of existence itself. It is not a theoretical construction, but a human desire, an affective need. It is the place of familiarity, of shared memory, of non-contractual solidarity. However, communities can also be places of overwhelm and pain, and Walzer is too lucid not to recognise how they can become oppressive and even aggressive. He is well aware that communities can hurt, exclude, dominate, crush, and annihilate individualities. They are 'greedy' associations, those 'that make radical and exclusive demands on the emotional participation of members and their daily commitments. The political or religious sect is the best example of this (...) I am a communitarian,' Walzer writes, 'to the extent that I value the bond and reciprocity of community life'. That is why his communitarianism is never identitarian or nationalistic, but deeply critical. He certainly would not like to live without identifying with one or more communities, but always with the awareness that we cannot simply be what we are: we also have the right to be something other than what we are. We can criticise, object and even defect from our communities, which must be places of recognition but which must always leave room for dissent, individuality, and movement between affiliations. Walzer does not idolise the 'we': he inhabits it, questions it, puts it in tension. He is a communitarian, but with reservations. He himself recounts his own biography as an interweaving of loyalty and criticism: Jewish, American, socialist, but never a slave to a single label. This plural gaze leads him to defend an idea of belonging that is not exclusive, but dialogic, capable of building bridges between cultures without erasing their specificity.

What radically distinguishes Walzer is his method: internal interpretation. Far from seeking external and abstract criteria to evaluate institutions, he proposes to read justice from the shared meanings of a community. We must understand the meaning of justice in the context of the values and practices of our community. This is why there cannot be only one idea of justice. Not just one good, but many goods, each linked to an area of our life in common. That is why, as we have seen in last weeks Mind the Economy, we cannot apply the logic of the market to schools, nor that of religion to politics. Each 'sphere' must be independent of the others, with its own specific internal criteria for distribution, and justice consists in respecting the autonomy and integrity of each sphere of action. Michael Walzer's communitarianism is a philosophy that looks at the world from within. It does not build ideal systems, it does not promise final solutions, it does not impose truths. Rather, it invites us to listen, to interpret, to remain faithful to our stories without, however, becoming prisoners of them. It is a philosophy of proximity, of rootedness, of lived pluralism. Being just, in this context, means recognising faces, listening to languages, inhabiting places and defending, each time, the dignity of the particular.

The theory of the spheres of justice is certainly one of the most original of the 20th century. It breaks with universalism and relativism, proposing an intermediate way that values cultural diversity without abandoning the perspective of moral judgement. We can and must judge communities, but we must do so in their own terms, through a process of deep interpretation, never forgetting that in communities we can find nourishment, but we can also encounter danger. They can be roots or become chains. And so Walzer gives us a vision of communitarianism that is not ideological but existential. A communitarianism that does not impose, but invites. That does not set boundaries, but makes them porous. Which reminds us that we are all, inevitably, 'children of a history, of a language, of a place', but that we also have the right to change our ways, to desert, to invent elsewhere. In today's fragmented world, his invitation is yes to defend the community, but never to shirk deep responsibility for the face of the other.

(*) Professor of Economics (13/A2), Department of Economics and Business, University of Cagliari