Constitution, Community, and Liberty, The
![handle is hein.journals/hjlpp8 and id is 293 raw text is: THE CONSTITUTION, COMMUNITY,
AND LIBERTY
WALTER BERNS*
Michael Walzer has written as eloquently as any contempo-
rary writer on the human need for community. Even in his lat-
est book, subtitled A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, he praises
the community for its attention to the needs of its members.'
According to Walzer, the well-ordered community sees that the
goods it distributes are distributed in proportion to need while
it recognizes and upholds the equality of membership.2 It is on
-this basis that Walzer complains of the extent to which we in
the United States and other western liberal democracies, have
allowed money to dominate human relationships.' Instead of
distributing love, respect, health, welfare and other goods in
proportion to need, we allow them to be purchased with
money.4 Political power can also be purchased with money just
as political power can be used to acquire money.5 Walzer calls
'the use of political power to gain access to other goods'
tyrannical.
However, that kind of tyranny is a phenomenon independent
,of time and place.7 Walzer believes that the aim of political
-egalitarianism is a society free of domination, and it is domi-
-nation when a person with one good (or quality) uses it to
.command a wide range of other goods.' However, in our de-
* John M. Olin Distinguished Scholar in Constitutional and Legal Studies, Ameri-
can Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
1. M. WALZER, SPHERES OFJUSTCE 68, 70, 73-74, 76-78, 80, 85, 86-91 (1983).
2. Id. at 84.
3. Id. at 97, 100-103, 112, 120-122, 310.
4. Id. at 100-103, 103-108.
5. Id. at 19.
6. Id.
7- Money and power have always been used to acquire love and beauty. Aristotle
Onasis got Jackie Kennedy, but Caesar got Cleopatra, and Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn.
Only in fairy tales does the poor but cultivated peasant, and not the rich and vulgar
lord, get the charming princess.
8. M. WALZER, supra note 1, at xiii, 10. According to Wazer, [e]very social good or
set of goods constitutes. . . a distributive sphere within which only certain criteria and
arrangements are appropriate. Id. at 9. Walzer notes, for example, that in the
sphere of ecclesiastical office money is inappropriate. The meanings society attrib-
utes to the social good that is ecclesiastical office and the criteria by which that good is
measured preclude it being available for sale or purchase. There are presumably
things that money will buy, Walzer writes. [B]ut not this thing. Id. A person pos-
sessing the social good that is money, therefore, can not impinge on the distributive
,sphere of ecclesiastical office to buy himself a bishopric.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hjlpp8&div=27&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Constitution, Community, and Liberty, The
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