Libralism and the Art of Separation Walzer

8/6/2019 Libralism and the Art of Separation Walzer

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Liberalism and the Art of SeparationAuthor(s): Michael WalzerSource: Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Aug., 1984), pp. 315-330Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191512

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THE RESOURCES OF AMERICAN LIBERALISMI. LIBERALISM AND THEART OF SEPARATION

MICHAEL WALZERThe Institutefor Advanced Study

II suggest that we think of liberalism as a certain way of drawing the

map of the social and political world. The old, preliberalmap showed alargelyundifferentiatedland mass, with riversand mountains, cities andtowns, but no borders."Everyman is a piece of the continent,"as JohnDonne wrote-and the continent was all of a piece. Society wasconceived as an organic and integratedwhole. It might be viewed underthe aspect of religion, or politics, or economy, or family, but all theseinterpenetratedone another andconstituted a single reality Church andstate, church-stateand university,civil society andpolitical community,dynasty and government, office and property, public life and privatelife, home and shop: each pair was, mysteriously or unmysteriously,two-in-one, inseparable. Confronting this world, liberal theoristspreached and practiced an art of separation. They drew lines, markedoff different realms, and created the sociopolitical map with which wearestill familiar. The most famous line is the "wall"between churchandstate, but there aremany others. Liberalism is a world of walls, and eachone creates a new libertyThis is the way the art of separationworks. The wall between churchand state creates a sphere of religious activity, of public and privateworship, congregations and consciences, into which politicians andbureaucrats may not intrude. Queen Elizabeth was speaking like aliberal, though a minimalist one, when she said that she would not"make a window into men's souls, to pinch them there."' Believers areset free from every sort of official or legal coercion. They can find theirown way to salvation, privately or collectively; or they can fail to findtheir way; or they can refuse to look for a way. The decision is entirelytheir own; this is what we call freedom of conscience or religious libertySimilarly, the line that liberals drew between the old church-state (orstate-church) and the universities creates academic freedom, leavingPOLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 12 No. 3, August 1984 315-330? 1984 Sage Publications, Inc.

315


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316 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1984

professors as free to profess as believers are to believe. The universitytakes shape as a kind of walled city. In the hierarchicalworld of themiddle ages, universitles were legally walled, that is, students andprofessors were a privileged group, protected from penalties andpunishments meted out to ordinary men. But this was a function of theintegration of the universities and the church (students and professorshad clerical status) and then of the church and the state. Preciselybecause of this integration, scholars did not enjoy the privilege ofheretical thought. Today the universities are intellectually though notlegally walled;students andprofessorshave no legal privileges,but theyare, in principle at least, absolutely free in the sphere of knowledge.2Privatelyor collectively, they can criticize,question, doubt, or rejecttheestablished creeds of their society. Or, what is more likely in anyrelativelystable society, they can elaborate the established creeds, mostoften in conventional, but sometimes in novel and experimental ways.

Similarly, again, the separation of civil society and political com-munity creates the sphere of economic competition and freeenterprise,the market in commodities, labor, and capital. I will focus for now onthe first of these threeand adopt the largestview of market freedom. Onthis view, the buyersand sellers of commodities areentirelyat libertytostrike any bargain they wish, buying anything, selling anything, at anyprice they can agree upon, without the interference of state officials.There is no such thing as ajust price, or at least there is no enforcementof a just price; and, similarly, there are not sumptuary laws, norestrictionson usury, no qualityorsafetystandards,no minimumwage,andso on. The maxim caveat emptor, let the buyerbeware,suggeststhatmarket freedom entails certain risks for consumers. But so doesreligious freedom. Some people buy unsafe products and some peopleare converted to false doctrines. Free men and women must bear suchrisks. I have my doubts about the analogy, since unsafe products poseactual, andfalsedoctrinesonly speculative,risks, but I won't pursuethisargument here. My immediate purpose is not to criticize but only todescribethe mapthe liberalsdrew, and on that map the commodity wasgiven at least as much room as the creed.Another example: the abolition of dynastic government separatesfamily and state and makes possible the political version of the "careeropen to talents," the highest form, we might say, of the labor market.Only the eldest male in a certain line can be a king, but anyone can be apresident or prime minister. More generally, the line that marks offpolitical andsocial position fromfamilial propertycreates the sphereof


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 317office and then the freedom to compete for bureaucratic and profes-sional place, to lay claim to a vocation, apply for an appointment,develop a specialty, and so on. The notion of one's life as one's projectprobably has its origin here. It is to be contrasted with the notion ofone's life as one's inheritance-on the one hand, the predeterminationofbirth and blood; on the other, the self-determination of struggle andachievement.

Finally, the separation of public and private life creates the sphereofindividual and familial freedom, privacyanddomesticity. Most recently,this has been described as a sphere of sexual freedom;so it is, but it isn'toriginally or primarily that; it is designed to encompass a very widerange of interests and activities-whatever we choose to do, short ofincest, rape, and murder, in our own homes or among our friends andrelatives: reading books, talking politics, keeping a journal, teachingwhat we know to our children, cultivating (or, for that matter,neglecting) ourgardens.Our homes are ourcastles, and there we are freefrom official surveillance. This is, perhaps, the freedom that we mosttake for granted-the two-way television screens of Orwell's 1984 are aparticularlyfrightening piece of science fiction-so it is worth stressinghow rare a freedom it is in human history. "Ourhomes are our castles"was first of all the claim of people whose castles were theirhomes, and itwas for a very long time an effective claim only for them. Now its denialis an occasion for indignation and outrage even among ordinarycitizens. We greatly value our privacy, whether or not we do odd andexciting things in private.3

IIThe art of separation has never been highly regarded on the left,especially the Marxist left, where it is commonly seen as an ideologicalrather than a practical enterprise. Leftists have generally stressed boththe radical interdependenceof the different social spheresandthe directand indirect causal links that radiate outwards from the economy. Theliberal map is a pretense, on the Marxist view, an elaborate exercise inhypocrisy, for in fact the prevailing religious creeds are adapted to theideological requirementsof a capitalist society; and the universities areorganized to reproducethe higherechelons of the capitalist work force;and the market position of the largest companies and corporations issubsidized and guaranteed by the capitalist state; and offices, though


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318 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1984not legally inheritable,are neverthelesspassedon andexchanged withinacapitalistpowerelite;and we arefree in our homes only so long as whatwe do there is harmless and without prejudiceto the capitalist order.Liberals draw lines and call them walls, as if they had the material forceof brick or stone, but they are only lines, one-dimensional, doctrinal,insubstantial. The contemporary social world is still an organic whole,less different from feudalism than we might think. Land has beenreplaced by moveable wealth as the dominant good, and while thatreplacementreverberatesthrough all the spheresof social life, it doesn'talter their deep connectedness.

And yet Marx also believed that the liberalartof separationhadbeenall too successful, creating, as he wrote in his essay on the Jewishquestion, "an individualseparatedfromthe community, withdrawn intohimself, wholly pre-occupied with his private interest and acting inaccordance with his private caprice."4I shall want to come back to thisargument later on for it makes an important point about the theoreticalfoundations of the liberalenterprise.For now, however, it is enough tosay that in Marx'seyes even the egotism of the separatedindividual wasa social product-required, indeed, by the relations of production andthen reproducedin all the spheresof social activity Society remained anorganized whole even if its members had lost their sense of connection.It was the goal of Marxist politics to restore that sense, or, better, tobring men and women to a new understanding of their connectednessand so enable them to take control of their common life. For Marx,separation, insofar as it was real, was something to be overcome. Sepa-rated institutions-churches, universities, even families-have no partin his program;their distinctive problems will be solved only by a socialrevolution. Society, for Marx, is always ruled as a whole, now by a singleclass, ultimately by all of its members working together.The leftist critique of liberal separation might, however, take adifferent form, holding that liberalism served particularsocial interestsand limited and adapted its art to that service. What is necessary is tomake the artimpartial-or, if that is a utopian project,at least to makeitserve a wider rangeof interests. As the institutions of civil society wereprotectedfrom state power, so now theymust be protected,andthe statetoo, from the new power that arises within civil society itself, the powerof wealth. The point is not to reject separation as Marx did but toendorse and extend it, to enlist liberal artfulness in the service ofsocialism. Themost important example of the extended art of separationhas to do with private government and industrial democracy, and I


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 319mean to defend that extension at some length. But it is important toinsist first that the separations already achieved, in principle if notalways in fact, have their value too. Even the career open to talents is aleftist as well as a liberal requirement. For socialism will never be asuccess so long as socialist parties and movements are led, as in RobertMichel's account, by a gerontocratic oligarchy whose members, drawnfrom the educated and professional middle class, coopt their ownsuccessors.5 One wants energetic, politically skillful workers andintellectualsto rise to positions of leadership,and so there must be roomfor such people to develop their talents and plan their careers. Moregenerally,Marx's vision of individual and collective self-determinationrequires (though he himself did not understand the requirement) theexistence of a protected space within which meaningful choices can bemade. But space of that sort can only exist if wealth and power arewalled in and limited.

Society is indeed all of a piece, at least in this sense: that its variousparts bear a family resemblance to one another, the outward reflectionof an internal genetic (sociological, not biological) determination. Butthis family resemblance leaves a great deal of room for the sociologicalversions of sibling rivalry and marital discord and grown-up childrenwith apartments of their own. So the bishops of the church criticizenational defense policy, the universities harbor radical dissidents, thestate subsidizes but also regulatescorporate activity, and so on. In eachcase, institutions are responsive to their own internal logic even whilethey arealso responsive to systemicdeterminations.The play of internallogic can only be repressed by tyrannical force, crossing the lines,breaking through the walls established by the art of separation.Liberalism is best understood as an argument against that sort ofrepression. It would be a meaningless argument, and tyranny asuperfluous politics, unless independent churches and universities, andautonomous states, reallyexisted or might reallyexist in the world. Butthey can and sometimes do exist. The art of separation is not an illusoryorfantasticenterprise; t is a morallyandpolitically necessaryadaptationto the complexities of modern life. Liberaltheory reflectsand reinforcesa long-term process of social differentiation. I shall want to argue thatliberal theorists often misunderstand this process, but at least theyrecognize its significance.Marxist writers tend to deny the significance of the process. It is, ontheir view, a transformation that doesn't make a substantial difference,an event or a series of events that takes place largely in the world of


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appearances. Liberal freedoms are, all of them, unreal. As the formalfreedom of the worker is only a mask for wage slavery, so religiousliberty, academic freedom, free enterprise, self-determination, andprivacyare masks for continued or reiteratedsubjection:the forms arenew, but the content is old. The difficulty with this view is that it doesn'tconnect in anyplausiblewaywith the actualexperienceof contemporarypolitics; it has a quality of abstraction and theoretical willfulness. Noone who has lived in an illiberal state is going to accept this devaluationof the range of liberal freedoms. The achievement of liberalism is realeven if it is incomplete. But the recognition of this achievement isdifficult within a Marxist framework:for the commitment to organicwholeness anddeepstructural ransformation doesn't readilyaccommo-date separated spheres and autonomous institutions. Nor is it mypurposehere to tryto work out such an accommodation. I want insteadto pursue the alternative criticism that liberals have not been seriousenough about theirown art. And I want to suggest that wherethey havebeen serious they have been guided by an inadequate and misleadingtheory. As with other forms of social life and political action, the liberalenterpriselends itself to more than one interpretation.

IIIThe art of separation doesn't make only for liberty but also forequality Consideragain, one by one, the examples with which I 6egan.Religious libertyannuls the coercivepowerof political andecclesiasticalofficials. Hence it creates, in principle, the priesthood of all believers,that is, it leaves all believersequally free to seek theirown salvation; andit tends to create, in practice,churches dominated by laymenratherthan

by priests. Academic freedom provides theoretical, if not alwayspractical, protection for autonomous universities, within which it isdifficultto sustainthe privilegedposition of richor aristocraticchildren.The free market is open to all comers, without regardto race or creed;alienandpariah groupscommonly exploit its opportunities;andthoughit yields unequal results, these results never simply reproduce thehierarchyof blood or caste or, for that matter, of "merit."The "careeropen to talents," if it is really open, provides equal opportunities toequally talented individuals. The idea of privacy presupposes the equalvalue, at least so far as the authorities areconcerned, of all privatelives;what goes on in an ordinaryhome is as much entitled to protection, andis entitled to as much protection, as what goes on in a castle.


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 321Under the aegis of the art of separation, liberty and equality go

together. Indeed, they invite a single definition: we can say that a(modern, complex, and differentiated)society enjoys both freedom andequality when success in one institutional setting isn't convertible intosuccess in another, that is, when the separations hold, when politicalpower doesn't shape the church or religious zeal the state, and so on.There are, of course, constraints and inequalities within each institu-tional setting, but we will have little reason to worry about these if theyreflect the internal logic of institutions and practices (or, as I havealready argued in Spheres of Justice, if social goods like grace, know-ledge, wealth, and office are distributed in accordance with sharedunderstandings of what they are and what they are for).6 But, all toooften, the separations don't hold. The liberal achievement has been toprotect a number of important institutions and practicesfrom politicalpower, to limit the reach of government. Liberals are quick to see thedanger to freedom and equality when the police repress a minorityreligion in the name of theoretical truth, or shut down petty-bourgeoisenterprises in the name of economic planning, or invade private homesin the name of morality or law and order. They are right in all thesecases, but these are not the only cases, or the only kinds of cases, inwhich libertyandequality arethreatened. We need to look closely at theways in which wealth, once political tyranny is abolished, itself takes ontyrannical forms. Limited government is the great success of the art ofseparation, but that very success opens the way for what politicalscientists call private government, and it is with the critique of privategovernment that the leftist complaint against liberalismproperly begins.The line between political community and civil society was meant tomark off coercive decision making from free exchange. That's why thesale of offices was banned and the old baronial right to do justice andconscript soldiers was transferred to state officials. And that'swhythosesame officials were denied the right to interfere in market transactions.But it is a false view of civil society, a bad sociology, to claim that all thatgoes on in the marketplaceis freeexchange and that coercion is never anissue there. Market success overrides the limits of the (free) market inthree closely related ways. First of all, radical inequalities of wealthgenerate their own coerciveness, so that many exchanges are onlyformally free. Second, certain sorts of market power, organized, say, incorporate structures, generate patterns of command and obedience inwhich even the formalities of exchange give way to something that looksvery much like government. And third, vast wealth and ownership orcontrol of productive forcesconvert readilyinto government in the strict


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322 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1984sense:capital regularlyandsuccessfullycalls upon the coercive power ofthe state.7

The problem here is less importantly a failure of nervethan a failureof perception. Liberaltheorists literallydid not "see" ndividual wealthand corporate power as social forces, with a political weight, as it were,different from their market value. They aimed to create a free market,and thought that they had done enough when they opposed stateintervention and set entrepreneursfree. But a free market, in which thethree kinds of coercion that I listed above are (largely) ineffective,requires a positive structure. Free exchange won't maintain itself; itneeds to be maintained by institutions, rules, mores, and customarypractices. Consider for a moment the religious analogy. The art ofseparation worked against state churchesand church states not only bydisestablishingthe churchbut also bydivestingit of material wealth andpower. Nor did it do this in the name of private faith alone, but also inthe name of congregational self-government. Congregationalism is byno means the natural or the only possible institutional arrangementonce church and state have been separated, but it is the cultural formbest adaptedto and most likely to reinforcethe separation.Similarlyinthe economic sphere:The art of separation should work against bothstate capitalism and the capitalist state, but it won't work successfullyunless it is accompanied by disestablishment and divestment-andunless appropriate cultural forms develop within the economic sphere.Theanalogue to privateconscience is individualenterprise; he analogueto congregational self-government is cooperative ownership.Without divestment and without cooperative ownership, the marketis bound to take shape in ways that defy the art of separation. Newconnections are quickly established. As I have alreadyindicated, theseare most importantly connections with the state, originating now fromthe market side rather than the state side, but deep and powerfulnonetheless. In addition, unlimited wealth threatens all the institutionsand practices of civil society-academic freedom, the career open totalents, the equality of "homes" and "castles." It is less overt, moreinsidious than state coercion, but no one can doubt the readyconvertability of wealth into power, privilege, and position. Wherearethe walls that wall in the market?In principle, perhaps, they alreadyexist, but they will never be effective until private governments aresocialized, just as established churches were socialized, that is, turnedover to their participants.Religious democracy must find its parallel inindustrial democracy. I won't try here to specify any particular set of


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 323institutional arrangements; there are many possible arrangementscompatible with the two crucialrequirements: hatthereshould be roomfor the entrepreneurand the new company, just as there is room for theevangelist and the "gathered"church;and that there should not be roomfor the kind of economic power that shapes and determines publicpolicy, any more than for the high ecclesiastical authority that routinelycalls upon the "seculararm."With this analogy, we can glimpse a consistent liberalism-that is,one that passes over into democratic socialism. But this is still ademocratic socialism of a liberalsort;it does not requirethe abolition ofthe market (nor does it require the abolition of religion) but rather theconfinement of the market to its proper space. Given an illiberalsocialism, where the state takes total control of economic life, the sameimperative would work in the opposite way, not to confine the marketbut to reassert its independence from the political realm. In the UnitedStates, then, the artof separation requiresthe restraint and transforma-tion of corporatepower. Inthe Soviet Union the same art would require,among other things, the liberation of individual enterprise.

IVDistributivejustice is (largely) a matter of getting the lines right. Buthow do we do that?How do we draw the map of the social world so thatchurches and schools, states and markets, bureaucracies and familieseach find their proper place? How do we protect the participants inthese different institutional settings from the tyrannical intrusionsof the

powerful, the wealthy, the well born, and so on? Historically, liberalshave taken as their foundation a theory of individualism and naturalrights. They mark out the lines so as to guarantee the secure existenceand free activity of the individual. Conceived in this way, the art ofseparation looks like a very radical project: It gives rise to a world inwhich every person, every single man and woman, is separated fromevery other. Thus Marx: "the so-called rights of man . are simply therights of egoistic man, separated from other men and from thecommunity ", Institutional autonomy is an intermediate, not an endpoint Inthe process of separation. The end is the individual, free withinhis or her circle of rights, protected from every sort of externalinterference. Liberal society, ideally, is simply a collection of these


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324 POLITICALTHEORY / AUGUST 1984circles, held together by all the tangential connections and actualoverlappings that their solitary inhabitants voluntarily establish.9Churches, schools, markets, and families are all the products of willfulagreements among individuals, valuable because of the agreement theyembody but at the same time subject to schism, withdrawal, cancella-tion, and divorce. Religious freedom is the right of the individual toworship his God (the pronoun is important, not because it is masculine,it can as easily be feminine, but because it is singular and possessive)publicly orprivately, howeverand with whomever else hechooses; it hasnothing to do, nothing in particular to do, with the doctrinal andinstitutionalcharacterof Judeo-Chnstian religiosity.Academic freedomhas nothing in particularto do with the universityas a social setting;it issimply the rightof the individual to study, to speak, to listen as he or shepleases. All other freedoms are accounted for in similar ways.Individual agreement is indeed an important source of our institu-tions, and individual rights of our freedoms. But taken together, withnothing more said, they make again for a bad sociology They do notprovide either a rich or a realisticunderstandingof social cohesion; nordo they make sense of the lives individuals actually live, and the rightsthey actually enjoy, within the framework of on-going institutions. Thegoal that liberalism sets for the art of separation-every person withinhis or her own circle-is literally unattainable. The individual whostands wholly outside institutions and relationships and enters intothem only when he or she chooses and as he or she chooses: Thisindividual does not exist and cannot exist in any conceivable socialworld. I once wrote that we could understanda person'sobligations bystudying his or her biography, the history of his or her agreementsandrelationships.10That is right, but only so long as one acknowledges thatpersonal history is part of social history;biographieshave contexts. Theindividual does not createthe institutions that he orshejoins; norcan heor she wholly shape the obligations he or she assumes. The individuallives within a world he or she did not make.The liberal hero, author of self and of social roles, is a mythicinvention: It is Shakespeare'sCoriolanus, that aristocraticwarrior andanti-citizen, who claims (and fails) to live "as if he were the author ofhimself and knewno other kin."'' Turnedinto a philosophical ideal anda social policy, this claim has frighteningimplications, for it is endlesslydislntegrative, reaching a kind of culmination, perhaps, in recentdiscussions about the rights of children to divorce their parents andparents their children. But this is individualism in extremis and not


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 325

likely, I think, to be sustained for long. The liberal hero is moreimportant as a sociological pretensethan as a philosophical ideal. He orshe opens the way for sham descriptions of churches, schools, markets,and families, as if institutions of this sort were in fact created,andwhollycreated, through the voluntary acts of individuals. The sham serves apractical purpose:It rulesout state interference n institutional life, sincethe state is in its nature coercive; and it makes it very difficult torecognize other, more subtle sorts of interference (including thatimitation of the state that I have already referred to as privategovernment). More concretely, it limits the uses of political power andsets money free, for what power takes by force, money merelypurchases, and the purchase has the appearance of a voluntaryagreement between individuals. In fact, it is often something differentthan that, as we can see if we place the purchase in its context andexamine its motives and effects. And then we arelikelyto conclude that,just as there arethings the state cannot do, so there must be things thatmoney cannot buy' votes, offices, jury decisions, uiniversity places-these arerelatively easy-and also the various sortsof national influenceand local domination that go along withthecontrol of capital. But to getthe limits right requires an understanding of institutional life morecomplex than the one that liberal individualism provides.Churches, schools, markets, and families are social institutions withparticular histories. They take different forms in different societies,forms that reflect different understandings of faith, knowledge, com-modities, and kinship obligations. In no case arethey shaped wholly byindividual agreements, for these agreements always take place within,and arealways constrainedby, particularpatternsof rules, customs, andcooperative arrangements. It follows from this that the art of separationis not rooted in or warranted by individual separateness (which is abiological, not a social, phenomenon); it is rooted in and warrantedbysocial complexity. We do not separate individuals; we separate institu-tions, practices, relationships of different sorts. The lines we drawencirclechurchesandschools andmarkets andfamilies,not you andme.We aim, or we should aim, not at the freedom of the solitary individualbut at what can best be called institutional integrity. Individuals shouldbe free, indeed, in all sorts of ways, but we don't set them free byseparating them from their fellows.And yet the separated individual looks more fundamental thaninstitutions and relationships, a firmer foundation for political andsocial philosophy. When we build from the individual we build, so it


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326 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1984seems to the liberal eye, from the ground up. But in fact the ground isalways social: persons-in-societies, not persons-by-themselves. Weneverencounterpersons-by-themselves,andthe effort to invent them, astrenuous exercise, has no agreed-upon outcome. We do not knowourselves as strangers to one another, absolute aliens, or isolates, andthere is no way to specify or understand what it would mean for such"individuals" o be free. Men and women arefree when they live withinautonomous institutions. We might take as our model the idea of a freestate, one that is not a colony or a conquered land, a state ruled byinternalrather than external forces. The inhabitants of such a state arefreeonly in a specialand limitedsense, butthat sense, asanyone who hasendureda militaryconquest knows, is real and important. And if thosesame individuals live within a state that is internallyfree(I will tryto saywhat that means in a moment) and if they participate in free churches,free universities, free firms and enterprises,and so on, we will at somepoint want to say that they are free generally Freedom is additive; itconsists of rightswithin settings, and we must understandthe settings,one by one, if we are to guarantee the rights. Similarly, each freedomentails a specific form of equality or, better, the absence of a specificinequality-of conquerors and subjects, believersand infidels, trusteesand teachers, owners and workers-and the sum of the absences makesan egalitariansociety

VOn the liberalview, men and women are not free in the state so much

as from it; and they areequal underthe law So they areprotected frompolitical power, conceived as a monopoly of physical force, immenselythreateningto the solitary individual. It is immenselythreatening,and Iwant to say again that the limitation of power is liberalism's historicachievement. But if we turn from individuals to institutions, it is clearthat political power itself requires protection-not only against foreignconquest but also against domestic seizure. The state is unfree whenpower is seized and held by a set of family members, or clergymen, oroffice-holders, or wealthy citizens. Dynastic, theocratic, bureaucratic,andplutocraticcontrol all makefor unfreedom-and for inequalitytoo.Meritocraticcontrol would have the same effect, though I don't believeit has ever been realized. Compared to family, church, office, and


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 327

corporation, universities and professional schools are relatively weak,though the men and women they license are not without politicalpretensions. A free state, in a complex society, is one that is separatedfrom all other institutions, that is to say, a state that is in the hands of itscitizens generally-just as a free churchis in the hands of believers,a freeuniversity in the hands of scholars, a free firm in the hands of workersand managers. And then citizens are free in the state as well as from it (infact, it is not as citizens that they arefreefrom the state but as believers,scholars, entrepreneurs,workers,parents,and so on); andthey areequalin the making of the law and not only under the law.

The art of separation works to isolate social settings. But it obviouslydoesn't achieve, and can't achieve, anything like total isolation, for thenthere would be no society at all. Writing in defense of religioustoleration, John Locke claimed that "thechurch is a thing absolutelyseparate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries arefixed and immovable."12Butthis is too radicalaclaim, deriving,I think,more from a theory of the individual conscience than from anunderstanding of churches and religious practices. What goes on in oneinstitutional setting influences all the others; the same people, after all,inhabit the differentsettings, and they share a history and a culture-inwhich religion plays a greateror lesserrole. The state, moreover, alwayshas a special influence, for it is the agent of separation and the defender,as it were, of the social map. It is not so much a night watchmanprotecting individuals from coercion and physical assault as it is thebuilder and guardian of the walls, protecting churches, universities,families, and so on from tyrannical interference.The members of theseinstitutions also, of cource, protectthemselves as best they can, but theirultimate resortwhen they arethreatened is an appeal to the state. This isso even when the threat comes from the state itelf: Then they appealfrom one group of officials or one branch of government to another, orthey appeal against the government as a whole to the body of citizens.One way of judging the actions of the state is to ask whether theyuphold institutional integrity-including the integrityof the state itself.Consider the relatively minor example of safety regulation. Caveatemptor, let the buyerbeware, is, as I saidearlier,a rule of the market,butit covers only a certain range of wariness. It has to do with disappoint-ment ("I don't look as handsome as I thought I would look in my newclothes"), frustration ("The blurb says this book is 'accessible to theintelligent layman,' so I bought it, but now I can't seem to understandit"), and even known and foreseeable risks ("These cigarettes are


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dangerous to my health"). Clothes and books and cigarettes areproperlymarket commodities. But the rangeof wariness doesn't extendto unknown and unforeseeable risks or to collective risks-as in thecase, say, of unsafe carsor of carsthat contaminate the air. The degreeofriskthat we live with on our highways and in our common environmentis a matterfor political decision; it belongs, so to speak, to the state andits citizens, not to the marketandits buyersand sellers.At least that is soon our currentunderstanding, as I understand it, of states and markets.The art of separation is properly artful when it draws a line that leavesthe risk of disappointment on one side and the risk of disaster on theother.But this artfulness, when it comes to concrete cases, is alwayscontroversial. There are problems of information and problems ofinterpretation. What goes on in this or that institutional setting? Andwhat is the internal logic of what goes on? These questions have to bedebated, first in particular institutional settings and then in the generalsetting of the state. The art of separation is a popular, not an esoteric,art. Liberals, however, have not always recognized its popular charac-ter, for if individual rightsare at stake then philosophers andjudges canclaim some special understanding of its requirements. It is the courtsthat define and patrol the circle of rights.'3 To focus on institutions,practices,and relationshipsis to shift the location of agency, to socializethe artof separation.Believers,scholars, workers, and parentsestablishand guardthe lines-and then the citizens as a body do so, through thepolitical process. Liberalismpasses definitively into democratic social-ism when the map of society is socially determined.But what if some political majority misunderstandsor overrides theautonomy of this or that institutional setting?That is the unavoidablerisk of democracy. Since the lines do not have the clear and distinctcharacterthat Locke thought them to have, they will be drawnhereandthere,experimentallyand sometimes wrongly. The line betweenpoliticsand exchange has, as I have suggested, been wrongly drawn for a longtime now: And we suffer from the abuse of market power. We have toargue, then, about the location of the line and fight (democratically) todraw it differently. Probably we will never get it exactly right, and thechanging character of states and market requires, in any case, itscontinual revisions, so the arguing and the fighting have no visible end.And what if tyrants seize control of this or that church or universityor company or family9 Michel Foucault has recentlycontended that adark and rigid discipline has been clampeddown upon a whole series of


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Walzer / LIBERALISM AND SEPARATION 329institutions-and that this is the work of internal elites, professionalmen and women with claims to scientific knowledge, not of politicalofficials.14 But I think that he exaggerates the success of these elites andtheir ability to sustain theirdiscipline without calling upon state power.It is only in authoritarian states, which systematically violate institu-tional integrity, that Foucault's "disciplinary society" is likely to berealized in anything like the form that he describes. Among ourselves,the risks are of a different sort; they include but are not limited toprofessional pretension and aggrandizement; we also have to worryabout internal corruption, bureaucraticprivilege, popular fearfulness,and passivityAll of these risks will be reduced, perhaps, insofar as the differentinstitutional settings have themselves been socialized, so that theirparticipants enjoy a rough equality and no group of believers,knowers,or owners is capable of reachingfor political power. If men and womenenjoy their different social roles, they are more likely to respect thesettings withinwhichthe roles areplayed. This is the socialist form of theold liberal hope that individuals secure in their own circleswon't invadethe circles of others. It is still a problematic but also I think a morerealistic hope, for it is lonely in those circles; the life of institutions ismore lively and more satisfying.

NOTES1. J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1934) p.174.2. Draft exemptions for college students represent perhaps, a modern version of the.medieval liberties. They breach the liberalwall between state and unlverstly-not becausethey violate academic freedom but ratherbecause they violate political integrity(theequalstanding of citizens).3. The artof separation remains an importantfeatureof contemporaryliberalism,as inRawls' Theory of Justice. His two principles, Rawls wrtes, "presuppose that the socialstructure can be divided into two more or less distinct parts,the first prnclple applying tothe one, the second to the other. They distinguish between those aspects of the socialsystem that define and secure the equal liberties of citizenshlp and those that specify andestablish social and economic inequalities," in A Theoryof Justice (Cambridge:Harvard

University Press, 1971),p. 61. Rawls redrawsthe old line betweenthe state and the market,though in a ratherdifferent way than I shall suggest below.4. Marx, Early Writings,trans. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), p. 26.5. Robert Michels, Political Parties, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Dover,1959).


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330 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 19846. Walzer, Spheres of Justice:A Defense of Pluralism and Equality(New York:BasicBooks, 1983).7. The best recent account of the transformationof marketpower into political poweris Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets(New York: BasicBooks, 1977),esp. Part V8. Marx, 1963, p.24.9. I omit here any discussion of the early twentieth-centurypluralists,someof whomare plausibly called liberals, since their arguments never attained the high philosophical

respectabilityof the doctrine of individual rights.10. Obligations: Essayson Disobedience, War,and Citizenship (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 1970),p. x.11. Coriolanus, Act V, scene iii.12. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Patrick Romanell (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), p. 2713. For a strong statement of the role of courts in defense of rights, see RonaldDworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1977).14. See especially Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).The argumentworks best for institutions likeprisons, hospitals, and asylums,where the subjectsof discipline arecivically,physically,ormentally incapacitated, but Foucault means it to apply also to schools and factories:pp.293ff.

Michael Walzer is a Professor of Social Science at the Institutefor AdvancedStudy in Princeton. He Is the author, most recently, of Spheres of Justice: ADefense of Pluralism and Equality (1983) and of the forthcoming Exodus andRevolution.

Libralism and the Art of Separation Walzer

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