The Decent Society

Avishai Margalit is a major contemporary political philosopher. He was born in Israel in 1939 and was raised and educated in Jerusalem. After high school, army service and a stay in a kibbutz, he began his university study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While a student, he spent several years as an educator in a youth village for new immigrant children. After his PhD, he joined the Hebrew University where he is the Schulman Professor of Philosophy. His three main areas are: the political and social philosophy, philosophy of language end the philosophy of religion. Margalit is an activist peace militant. His most recent book is Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, New York, NY: The Penguin Press (2004).

One can consider that The Decent Society is probably the most important book on political philosophy published since Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). But if the Theory of Justice is used to analyse business and enterprises from a political and social philosophy point of view, it is less the case for The Decent Society.

For Margalit, a decent society – or a civilized society – is one whose institutions do not humiliate the people under their authority, and whose citizens do not humiliate one another. The “decency” is a theme that has been largely neglected in political philosophy since Rousseau. Notice that decency can be regarded as the central object the traditional Chinese political philosophy (or what could be considered as the equivalent of the occidental political philosophy) and a main key of the Orwell's work. This book is also inspired by Isaiah Berlin (positive vs negative liberty) and Judith N. Shklar (especially Ordinary Vices 1984). It is, at last, rooted in Margalit's experience at the borderlands of conflicts between Eastern Europeans and Westerners, between Palestinians and Israelis.

Margalit makes a clear distinction between a “decent society” and “just society” based, since Rawls, on equity and on a right balance between freedom (s) and equality. For Margalit, the ideal of just society is a sublime one but hard to implement in political and social institution. The decent society, by contrast, seems more realisable. Rather to build justice, we should first to try to rob cruelty and humiliation that soak our social (such as snobbery) or political (such as bureaucracy) institutions. Decently must precede social justice notably because it is more implementable.

After a programmatic introduction, the book is structured into four parts. The first one explores the “concept of humiliation” by confronting it to honour and rights ones. The second explores the “grounds of respect”. The third one disserts on “decency as a social concept” especially relying it with citizenship and culture. In the last and part “putting the institutions to the test” Margalit reviews snobbery, privacy, bureaucracy, the Welfare Society, unemployment and punishment on the light of decently.

One of the main interests of this book is to underline the importance of sociability as substrata of any good society. Therefore, for Margalit, how to be decent – at the individual level – is linked to how to build a decent society at the formal institutions level. This book is a model of how philosophers, by distinguishing similar‐sounding moral terms, can help to clarify our moral language and understanding in order to make us better.

Beyond its major interest as social and political philosophy book, this book could open a new approach to analyse – politically – the relations between society and business. In that context, unfortunately, after the reading, the hypothesis that the functioning of the nowadays enterprises is diluting the sociability and the decently can be laid.