The Factory of Spheres: Michael Walzer and Practical Equality
Résumé
Astrid von Busekist explores the genealogy of Spheres of Justice and ties together some of the strings of Walzer’s writings on equality and justice. She shows that Spheres has a special place in his career as a thinker, a teacher, an editor, and a political activist. His commitments, theoretical and practical, to egalitarian pluralism, his anthropological and phenomenological approach to justice, his politics of the right distance, and his defense of morally rooted shared understandings are at the heart of the factory of Spheres. The architecture of Spheres, an elaborate system conceived to subvert domination, is different in important ways from other writings on justice, not least because Spheres is a testimony to Walzer’s connectedness to the real world. The motivation that informs his thinking, von Busekist suggests, is what she calls a “politics of comradeship.”
