Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

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СКАЧАТЬ because of their emphasis on storytelling. One of his central insights is that political theory must consider how particular peoples in particular times and places tell each other stories about how they relate to each other as a people.

      Second, Walzer is noteworthy as an important social-democratic alternative to the liberalism that dominates much Anglo-American political theory and the post-Marxism and post-modernism of much European work. Indeed, Walzer is arguably the most important social-democratic theorist in the contemporary USA, which makes his work of particular salience in the context of the revival of social democracy during the US Presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. Probably the most significant feature of Walzerian social democracy is its appeal to community (Walzer 1990b), resting on the thought that liberal individualism tends to leave insufficient room for collective action, while Marxism is too quick to write off the lived experience of ordinary citizens, underestimating the merits of contemporary society (Walzer 1980b: 4–6). Walzer seeks radical change that starts from the values of particular communities, but reworks social practices to achieve equality by ensuring that practice lives up to principle. For Walzer, “Socialism is the effort to sustain older values within a social structure that accommodates liberated … free and equal individuals” (Walzer 1980b: 12). This makes the vision reformist, but committed to the view that a long series of incremental changes can produce the sort of systemic transformation that is rightly considered revolutionary (Walzer 1980b: 201–23).

Walzer’s social-democratic vision is the result of his long association with Dissent, a New York intellectual magazine on which he has worked since his undergraduate years in the mid-1950s and which he co-edited from 1975 to 2013. Dissent’s platform throughout those decades has been to advance an American version of social democracy that breaks with the liberalism of the Democratic Party while resisting the authoritarianism it sees in much twentieth and twenty-first-century communism around the world. According to Walzer, he joined the magazine because its founders, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser – who taught him as an undergraduate at Brandeis University – were an inspiration, bequeathing to him the view that “there [is] a political space between liberal Democrats and communists – and that [is] a space worth living in” (Walzer 2013b: 104; see also Kazin 2013). One of the crucial features of this space is its commitment to making social change speak to the people whose position it seeks to improve much more directly than, the Dissentniks think, do many alternatives. As Howe put it, in words that resonate with Walzer’s work on social criticism (Walzer 1987: 33–65), American social democrats should operate within the American “myth” of democracy while attacking failures to live up to that myth (“Discussion” 1976: 70). Walzer puts the point by arguing that a political theory, especially an egalitarian one, must take its starting point from “politics on the ground” if it is to have meaning to its purported beneficiaries (Walzer 2007: 304). This means that social democracy will be in part dependent on features specific to particular contexts, so there will be myriad types of social democracy that vary across societies. Walzer has as a result long combined commitment to equality with commitment to pluralism. Indeed, Spheres of Justice, his major statement of social-democratic theory – and in my view his most important work – is subtitled A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Walzer 1983).

Pluralism means in the first instance that there are multiple important social values and meanings that must be reflected in a plurality of distributive principles for which a theory of justice advocates. Walzer argues that, “Different goods should be distributed to different people for different reasons” (Walzer 1980b: 242). The principle by which people gain access to healthcare, for example, should not be the same as that by virtue of which people receive leisure time, commodities, or political power (Walzer 1983). Walzer insists that, because both people and social goods are diverse, equality requires the reflection of such diversity within a theory of justice (Walzer 1980b: 243), or that “many bells should ring” (242). Walzer’s pluralism is concomitant with an emphasis on particularism: the idea that different communities have varying moral standards that ought to guide their political practice, and so that distributive principles must vary across societies. To some extent, this idea, too, reflects the influence of Dissent, which taught Walzer that social democracy in America must be, in part, American (on this, see Walzer 1994a: 60–1; for discussion, Isserman 1987, Sorin 2002).

      Much of the secondary literature on Walzer’s work in political theory does not do much more than mention his association with Dissent (see for example, Benbaji and Sussmann 2014: 2, Orend 2000: 49), but I will show that it is crucial to understanding his social-democratic commitments, as well as his approach, his arguments, and the topics on which he focuses. One marker of its significance is that Walzer regards his work for Dissent as integrally connected to his political theory: he never decides until he has finished drafting an article whether to publish it in Dissent or a political-theory journal, although if he does pick the latter, he will subsequently add footnotes and make the prose “muddier.”² The close connection of these two genres in Walzer’s corpus points to the third major way in which Walzer’s commitment to situated theory is significant, which is that in important ways his work blurs the line between academic and public-intellectual discourse (Krupnick 1989). He has also published many important commentaries in the New Republic, another important magazine for left-liberal work. He is often interviewed for or included in histories of New York intellectual life since the mid-twentieth century (Jumonville 1991, Isserman 1987, Sorin 2002, Young 1996; see especially Jumonville 2007, which lists Walzer as a “third generation New York Intellectual.”)

As a public intellectual, many of Walzer’s articles stray far beyond the usual remit of political theory: he has written extensively on literature (see especially Walzer and Green, ed. 1969), urban planning (Walzer 1986e), technological development, and above all has produced much political commentary. This last was particularly important to both his early and his most recent work, including a striking call for Martin Luther King to run for the US Presidency in 1964 (Rosenblum and Walzer 1963). Not only does Walzer treat public-intellectual writing and political theory as more closely related than would most participants in both enterprises, but in important ways he prefers the former, arguing that a political theory that does not seek to enter into broader public discourse produces an “alienated politics” marked by “endless esotericism” (“State” 1989: 337–8). Such political theory is, Walzer holds, further from the world of political discourse than it should be and consequently tends toward intellectual elitism (Walzer 2007: 308), whereas public-intellectual magazines are “home to an ongoing conversation … a political argument in which many people participate” (Walzer 1994b: 165). Walzer became a political theorist because he wanted to make normative arguments about issues of pressing public concern (Walzer 2007: 306–9). His notion that political theorists have a license to make normative arguments is in effect the claim that they can act as public intellectuals. This makes Walzer a significant figure bearing in mind, as I discuss in the conclusion, a common story about American life that suggests that public intellectuals have been crowded out by academic specialization in recent decades (on this, see Furedi 2004, Jacoby 2000, Etzioni and Bowditch 2006; for discussion, Hauck 2010).

On Walzer’s account, then, political theory should be socially situated and politically engaged. That is, it should seek to provide interventions in political debates that evoke common understandings in a plausible, persuasive manner. This makes him an important critic of the Rawlsian approach to political theory, which proceeds mostly by using the techniques of analytic philosophy, the dominant mode of Anglophone philosophy today.³ In general, analytic philosophers tend to work within the Enlightenment tradition, and see the tasks of philosophy as either providing an account of the meaning of and relationship between concepts or providing perspective on the underpinnings of other disciplines (Pettit 2012: 5–7). For many decades, this meant that analytic political philosophers restricted themselves to analyzing the meaning of political and moral concepts, but following Rawls it has often come to revolve around the construction of normative theories of justice, rights, equality, and so on (for discussion, Pettit 2012: 6–13). Walzer is wary of such theories in part because of their philosophical ambition, instead arguing for a limited conception of the tasks of philosophy in which theorists leave open room for continued disagreement and do not seek to СКАЧАТЬ