The most striking feature of Walzers critique is that, far from rejecting the principle of reward according to merit, Walzer insists on its validity. People who excel should receive the superior benefits appropriate to their excellence. But people exhibit a great variety of qualitiesintelligence, physical strength, agility and grace, artistic creativity, mechanical skill, leadership, endurance, memory, psychological insight, the capacity for hard workeven moral strength, sensitivity, the ability to express compassion. Each deserves its proper recompense, and hence a proper distribution of material goods should reflect human differences as measured on all these different scales. Yet, under capitalism, the ability to make money of bourgeois society) enables its possessor to acquire almost every other sort of social good, such as the respect and esteem of others.
The centerpiece of Walzers argument is the invocation of a quotation from Pascals Pensees, which concludes: Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another. Pascal believes that we owe different duties to different qualities. So we might say that infatuation is the proper response to charm, and awe the proper response to strength. In this light, Walzer characterizes capitalism as the tyranny of money . And Walzer advocates as the means of eliminating this tyranny and of restoring genuine equality the abolition of the power of money outside its sphere. What Walzer envisions is a society in which wealth is no longer convertible into social goods with which it has no intrinsic connection.
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