MW: Can you really look at all the different societies that human beings have built, acknowledge the range of difference, and still believe that it would be better if all humanity were living in the same way, with the same social practices and political institutions, in one big society (Plato’s Republic writ large) or in many similar smaller ones (like the Israeli kibbutzim)? Does it make sense to say that all the actually existing societies are really trying to reach the same ideal? Don’t they have different ideals? Perhaps incompatible ideals?

APF: No, the idea of the good must be coherent; its different features can’t be inconsistent with one another, or else we wouldn’t be able to say what goodness is. The good society will no doubt be a complex creation, but, finally, it will be a singular creation; its different features will fit together in a specific way that is the right way. And so it makes sense to think of existing societies as so many failed efforts to reach the right way.

MW: Well, I agree that there are failures, but they are of many different kinds—and there are also different kinds of success.

Even here, however, on the left, freedom and equality don’t make for a single good society, for these values are open to a variety of enactments. Indeed, they will be realized differently in different settings, or they won’t be realized at all anywhere.

What Is “The Good Society”? by Michael Walzer