An Art Of Separation

Michael Walzer is a productive and distinguished Jewish-born American thinker in politics philosophy. Increasing importance and admittance has been attached to contemporary pluralist theory of justice originated by Walzer. His pluralist theory of justice pursues and shows itself as an art of separation. He demonstrates the pluralism of distribution's objects, methods, receptors and subjects. Furthermore, his methodology lays stress on the value of "separation". Its original intention was to reach a kind of comprehensive surmounting by carrying necessary correction upon the neo-liberalist theory of justice such as Rawl's and Nozick's, and make it more suitable for the settlement of multi-layer and multi-dimensional, complicated and particular social problems of justice.Grounded in pluralism, upsetting membership as the prerequisite, choosing social goods as the perspective, and taking complex equality as the goal, Walzer analyses three principles of justice and their application margin by means of interpretation with examples. He advocates that it is important to regard social articles as the start point for the realization of just distribution, and that the first step thing is to confirm articles' characteristics. He therefore concludes six basic ideas about articles, including the objects of just distribution, the way to take up articles, the location of the significance of articles, the decisive factors in distribution, the factors to change distribution, and the essential attributes of distribution. And then, in respect of actual conditions of U.S.A., he analyses carefully a series of social articles and the intrinsic principles of their distribution. He emphasizes that the membership distribution is the prerequisite for the distribution of other articles, because it demarcates the range of legal receptors for just distribution. After the affirmation of receptors, a method of just distribution is required. In the view of Walzer, there should be a kind of only pluralist principle and a kind of only proper pluralism, and three principles of justice (free exchange, deserve and need) are exactly in conformity with this. Abandoning or destroying the pluralist principle all along, Simplistic equality and hierarchical autocracy come to fall in tyranny. The only feasible Utopia can only be a government of complex equality...