Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

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Introduction

A common image of philosophy is that of abstraction from any particular set of values and meanings so as to find an objective or impartial position. On this view, philosophers should avoid social and cultural influences, because they can cloud a thinker’s judgment, and political theorists should avoid political advocacy or at least ground it in arguments that they think all reasonable people can or should accept. This image has a long pedigree in the history of philosophy that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Socrates. Plato’s analogy of the cave suggests that only by escaping from ordinary notions can philosophers discover the real truth (Plato 1997: 1132–6). Plato even has Socrates argue in the Phaedo that philosophers should be in love with death because it releases them from the needs of the body, freeing them up to think without distraction (56–9). The image continues to appeal in recent thought. For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers, once argued that what makes someone a philosopher is not belonging to any community of ideas (for discussion, Walzer 1981: 1–2). Within political theory, in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most important work in the field in English since 1945, John Rawls deploys a thought experiment in which participants to debates about principles of justice lack knowledge of any specific details about themselves (Rawls 1971: 17–22, 136–42). Rawls suggests that to think in this way is to adopt “the perspective of eternity” (587).¹ Like Rawls, Harvard philosopher Tim Scanlon argues that valid normative principles are those that nobody can reasonably reject (Scanlon 1998, Rawls 1993: 48–54).

      In this book, I argue that what makes Michael Walzer a key contemporary thinker is that he embodies an important political and theoretical alternative to this traditional position. Walzer is one of the leading political theorists in the post-war USA. His body of work is both broad and varied: he has made contributions to just-war theory, distributive justice, philosophical interpretation, multiculturalism, Jewish thought, and many other topics. Walzer’s arguments – including the “moral reality of war” (Walzer 2015a: 3–48), the “moral equality of soldiers” (34–41), “complex equality” (Walzer 1983: 3–30), “shared understandings” (312–21), the “moral standing of states” (Walzer 1980a), “social criticism” (Walzer 1987, 1988a), and “moral minimalism” (Walzer 1994a: 1–20) – have made major contributions to how political theorists think about their subjects.

      Walzer’s significance in political theory lies in his active embrace of the particularity of time, place, and commitment. This makes Walzer a much more political thinker than are most scholars in the field – indeed, a collected volume of his most important essays is called Thinking Politically (Walzer 2007). I will show that this is true in three interrelated yet importantly distinct ways. First, throughout his long career, Walzer has defended a position that is situated in the life of his own societies, refusing to “walk out of the cave, leave the city … [fashion] an objective and impartial standpoint” (Walzer 1983: xiv). Rather, he has operated under the assumption that political theorists have a “license,” granted to few other scholars, to stake out political positions and make contestable arguments for them (Walzer 2013a). This means that Walzer represents a type of political theory that seeks to avoid academic specialization, adopting a language that is accessible to, and continuous with, that of intellectual life more broadly. He regards it as a mistake for philosophy to seek “too much abstraction … from the real world” (Walzer 2007: 308) and insists that theorists avoid infringing on democratic prerogative (Walzer 1981). This is Walzer’s methodological contribution.

In disciplinary terms, this makes Walzer’s work highly distinctive, because he draws upon narrative fields in the social sciences as much as, or more than, the tools of philosophy on which most other political theorists rely. Walzer’s method is at core sociological, and his criticisms of important theorists such as Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert Nozick stem from their rejection of “every sort of sociological politics, where principles are derived from conventional practices” (Walzer 1980c: 39–40). Walzer’s work also often draws on history, notably in his work on justice in war, which he illuminates with examples from across several millennia of military practice, starting as far back as ancient Greece. Indeed, his most famous book, Just and Unjust Wars, is subtitled A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations because it was important to Walzer that he avoid too much reliance on the hypothetical examples to which many contemporary philosophers appeal so that his work spoke to participants in war (Walzer 2015a: xxviii–xxix; see also 335–46). In other works, his examples are anthropological and aim to illustrate differences in social, political, and moral meaning, value, and practice to illuminate Walzer’s core thesis that meaning does not inhere in nature but is always a collective product that СКАЧАТЬ