Waltzer, Michael. (1984). "Welfare, Membership and Need". In Michael J. Sandel (Ed.), Liberalism and its critics: Readings in social and political theory (pp. vi, 272 p.). New York: New York University Press.
For Waltzer, the structures of societies are, at least in part, naturally determined. “Men and women come together because they literally cannot live apart” (201). This premises life on social interaction and the proximity of individual humans. This also brings about the fulfillment of a social contract, or a tacitly held agreement by different members of a community that they are part of a unified group.
Once membership is identified, it is possible for a community to begin to identify that the members of a community owe something to one another. “Membership is important because of what the members of a political community owe to one another and to no one else, or to no one else in the same degree” (200). This membership entitles people to receive the benefits determined by the society.
What a person is entitled to receive from society are called “socially recognized needs”. Socially recognized needs, in Waltzer’s construction, are needs that a society begins to understand as being fundamental for living the good life. “The social contract is an agreement to reach decisions together about what goods are necessary to our common life, and then to provide those goods for one another” (200).
However, this agreement is not necessarily straightforward or simple to explain.
Waltzer examines the nature of needs, finds that they are elusive, that people are not clear about what exactly the need, that needs are expansive and not static and that needs can be identified as either particular or general (201-3). This varied, nuanced account of what constitutes a need requires a complex metric for determining how a society arrives at the definition of a socially recognized need.
In evaluating the nature of welfare distribution and need reorganization, Waltzer identifies different features of need satisfaction. Firstly, he claims that coercion is clearly an aspect of need satisfaction in a large group, because, “…some minority of actual people don’t understand, or don’t consistently understand, their real interests” (206). Additionally, our author points out that any need satisfaction is necessarily, “…redistributive in character” (207).
This brings Waltzer back to one of the initial concepts that he used to construct his argument. He expands on his earlier definition by saying that the social contract is, “…an agreement to redistribute the resources of the members in accordance with some shared understanding of their needs, subject to ongoing political determination in detail” (208). Therefore, we have an argument about the nature of the welfare state that depends on the satiation of needs determined by a community that can be amended at any time through the political process.
Waltzer then applies this approach to the US medical system. He highlights that the US does not do an excellent job of fulfilling the recognition of the basic needs of the society. The reasons, for Waltzer, are the following: “…the community of citizens is loosely organized; various ethnic and religious groups run welfare programmes of their own; the ideology of self-reliance and entrepreneurial opportunity is widely accepted; and the movements of the left, particularly the labour movement, are relatively weak” (210). These structural weakness of the US demographics, history and culture has led to their inability to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens.
The argument is the made that medical rights are, in fact, a socially recognized need for Americans. Originally, medical treatment was basically for the wealthy, but this changed over time. Progressively, as the influence of the church abated and the influence of secular organizations increased in prominence, citizens believed that they increasingly had a right to good medical care. “People will not endure what they no longer believe the have to endure” (213).
Additionally, Waltzer makes the case that these needs can not be satisfied by the market alone. “Needed goods are not commodities” (215). The goods that are provided by market forces are different from the goods that are provided by the state. Needed goods are not goods that can be bought and sold, as they are basic for the substance of human life.
The piece ends with Waltzer making the case that the fulfillment of basic medical needs in the US needs to happen because they are a socially recognized right. He then presents an adapted Marxist formulation to highlight the argument made: “From each according to his ability…to each according to his socially recognized need” (217). However, the identification of those needs, members of a community or the proper path to mitigate those needs is not necessarily straight forward: the devil is in the details.
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