Michael Rustin locates Spheres of Justice in the political context of the early 1980s. He sees it as having been a valuable departure from the influential but more procedural approach to social justice that was advanced by John Rawls. Walzer’s argument was more historical and anthropological in its method than abstractly philosophical, drawing on particular examples and “thick descriptions” to defend a pluralist conception of wellbeing against the imposition on human lives of monolithic powers, whether these be of markets, capital, or authoritarian socialist states. Walzer’s remains an essential contribution to democratic socialist thought, through its recognition of the desirable diversity of individual and social goods. Rustin suggests, however, than Aristotelian conceptions of human flourishing might provide a better framing than even Walzer’s amplified ideas of social justice for the perspective he advocates. He also argues, drawing on the “grid-group” theory of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, for the positive value of hierarchy, at a pole opposition to individualism, in the ordering of human societies. The chapter ends with the example—as a “sphere of justice”—of the practices of the UK’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution.