DANIEL BELL
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privilege in realms where it is not relevant. Thus it is unjust, I argue,
for wealth to command undue advantage in medical facilities, when
these are social rights that should be available to all. In the realms of
wealth, status and power, there are principles of just allocation that are
distinctive to each realm.
Yet I am a liberal in politics-defining both terms in the Kantian
sense. I am a liberal in that, within the polity, I believe the individual
should be the primary actor, not the group (be it family or corporation
or church, or ethnic or minority group). And the polity, I believe, has
to maintain the distinction between the public and the private, so that
not all behavior is politicized, as in communist states, or left without
restraint, as in the justification of laissez-faire in traditional capitalist
societies.
The public realm operates under the rule of law which applies
equally to all, and is therefore procedural : it does not specify outcomes
between individuals; it treats people equally rather than seeking to
"make them" equal. The private realm-in morals and economics-is
one where consenting parties make their own decisions, so long as the
spillover effects (pornography in one instance, pollution in the other)
do not upset the public realm.
I believe in the principle of individual achievement, rather than
the inherited, or prescribed allocation of social positions. But I am not
an egalitarian in the current, fashionable sense that the law should
make
persons equal-a situation which is not, in fact, equality but
representation by numerical quota. One of the reasons that I distin–
guish between needs and wants is that I do not see how, in the
economic realm, one can make incomes equal. The insistence on wage
differentials-which is strongest among workers-reflects the moral
intuition that differences in skill and effort should be rewarded
differently. Once a social minimum is created, then what people do
with the remainder of their money (subject to the principle of illegiti–
mate convertibility), is their own business, just as what people do in
the realm of morals is equally their own business, so long as it is done
privately. And, if universalism prevails in social competition, then the
criterion of merit, I believe, is a just principle
to
reward individual
achievement in the society.
I am a conservative in culture because I respect tradition; I believe
in reasoned judgments of good and bad about the qualities of a work of
art; and I regard as necessary the principle of authority in the judging
of the value of experience and an and education. I use the term culture
to mean less than the anthropological catchall which defines any
"patterned way of life" as a culture, and more than the aristocratic
