The book offers a collection of essays that reinterpret and reimagine Michael Walzer s classic work Spheres of Justice as an important contribution to political theorizing about justice in the 2020s. It highlights the social-democratic nature of Walzer s theory of justice as a significant aid to rethinking egalitarian politics today, as well as some of the deeper structural elements of the theory, such as Walzer s interpretivism and pluralism. As a result, it both offers the most wide-ranging and up-to-date account of this important book and rethinks some of the major contributions that it has made to political theory and philosophy. Contributors include several senior scholars who are among Walzer s foremost and most long-standing interlocutors, as well as some of the younger scholars who have done important work in Walzer studies. The volume will stand alongside Palgrave Macmillan s Walzer and War as a crucial companion to Walzer s other major book, Just and Unjust Wars.
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The Factory of Spheres: Michael Walzer and Practical Equality.- Chapter 3. Interpretation and Social Meanings.- Chapter 4. Maybe Even Souls: The Moral Basis of Socialism in Spheres of Justice.- Chapter 5. Complex Equality, Political Participation, and Democracy in the Workplace.- Chapter 6. Michael Walzer on Immigration: A Critical Analysis.- Chapter 7. Whatever Happened to Shared Understandings? Do They Survive?.- Chapter 8. Spheres of Justice Revisited After 41 Years.- Chapter 9. Defending the Medical Sphere: Using Walzer in the 2020s.- Chapter 10. Response.
J. Toby Reiner is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he teaches and researches contemporary political thought, with primary focus on theories of distributive justice, community, migration, and interpretive method.
