In Spheres of Justice, and in related works, Michael Walzer writes a great deal about what follows from a commitment to equality, but little about what the foundations of such a commitment might be in the first place. Yet what he writes suggests a certain way of understanding egalitarian commitments from which an account of such foundations can be inferred. Especially when read alongside related passages in his later book Thick and Thin, and in the context of works just offstage from Spheres, especially R. H. Tawney’s Commonplace Book, readers today might find in Spheres an account of the moral basis of egalitarianism. Walzer does not give his readers an avenue toward claiming a warrant of authority for egalitarian politics; rather, he implies a kind of moral foundation that we might call an orientation, and he makes room for the idea that this orienting foundation is to be found in the mystery of human ensoulment.