Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

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СКАЧАТЬ (see above all Walzer 1980a, 1981, 1989/90), instead advocating a “democratic idealism,” by virtue of which each community has the right to govern itself by its own standards (Walzer 1994a: 58). Walzer’s vision of democracy involves pluralizing the modes and means by which ordinary citizens participate in decision-making processes. It is because he emphasizes the importance of political action by large numbers of citizens as one of the key means of creating a more just and egalitarian society (Walzer 1971a, 2004a) that he argues that philosophers should leave major theoretical questions unresolved.

      In important ways, Walzer’s arguments for a more politically engaged approach anticipate the new “realism,” which is one of the major growth areas in Anglo-American political theory. Like Walzer, new realists argue that political theory must leave room for democratic decision-making and not seek to resolve political debates (Williams 2005: 3, Galston 2010: 390–4, Larmore 2013: 294–8). Insofar as realism is an offshoot of analytic political theory, Walzer’s criticisms should be understood as an internal critique of certain tendencies within the analytic approach, and especially of Rawlsian liberalism. However, Walzer’s particularism takes his critique a step beyond most realist arguments (for a fuller discussion on this point, see Reiner 2016: 383–5), which generally do not focus on variation in normative standards across cultures.

I will argue that Walzer’s particularism is key to understanding his method and illustrates that his work does in fact follow a roughly consistent philosophical methodology. Walzer treats meaning as a human creation, something that communities establish in the course of their ongoing lives (Walzer 1983; the key influence is Geertz 1973). Philosophers must start with social meanings because, on Walzer’s account, there is no alternative: meaning does not exist outside society. As a result, our identities develop in the societies that create meaning for us. This means that the world has a “moral reality” of its own, consisting in the sets of meanings that we create via social construction (Walzer 2015a: 3–20). However, these meanings are susceptible to myriad readings. It is the task of political theory to interpret, systematize, and clarify sets of meanings. This work can, Walzer insists, aid the social-democratic project by exploiting inconsistency between meaning and practice, or between different parts of the sets of meaning, to argue for change, often radical change, to the status quo that, nonetheless, emerges out of a socially situated set of norms (Walzer 1987). Readers of Walzer will likely recognize these arguments from his theory of justice (Walzer 1983). It is important to emphasize that Walzer’s just-war theory also takes as its foundation meanings that human beings have created in the history of war and uses those meanings as evidence that moral discourse about war is comprehensible and coherent (Walzer 2015a: 4–16). Similarly, Walzer attempts to reform military practice to make room for collective self-determination and communal self-governance – this was at the heart of his objection to the American war in Vietnam (Walzer 2015a: 97–100).

      Critics have often suggested that Walzer’s appeal to social meanings fails to recognize the degree of contestation, conflict, and domination that goes into processes of social construction.⁴ This points to a seeming paradox in Walzer’s career, when considered politically: while he has always defined himself as a social democrat and criticized liberalism from a position that he takes to be to its left, both liberals and radicals have often read his work as resting on somewhat conservative assumptions (see most notably Said 1986). Understanding Walzer, then, means coming to terms with the distance between his self-description as a leftist and an egalitarian and much of his reception. For example, in reviewing Spheres of Justice, Ronald Dworkin famously claimed that justice must be “our critic, not our mirror,” and that appeal to social meanings cannot be the basis for egalitarian political theory (Dworkin 1983a: 4, Cohen 1986, Daniels 1985). To liberals, Walzer’s approach seems to stifle individual freedom to choose a set of values to guide one’s life.

For Marxists and other radicals to Walzer’s left, he can appear too sanguine about the impact of power, oppression, and domination,⁵ for while he recognizes all those processes, he insists that social construction involves both coercion and consensus, and so is a mixed and mysterious process (for examples, see Walzer 1987: 33–65, 1993a, 1993b, 2003). As a result, he holds, social norms tend to be meaningful not just for dominant groups, but for all members of the societies in question. However, Walzer’s appeal to community values is not uncritical: socialists, he argues, seek communities “of a certain sort, not of any sort,” and do so “for the sake of knowledge and self-management” more than of “intimacy and good fellowship” (Walzer 1980b: 12–13). What this means is that while, for Walzer, political theorizing must both start from communal norms and proceed with reference to values that the theorist takes the community to hold, it need not end up endorsing communal conclusions or dominant political arrangements. Immanent critique, which holds that practices are deeply antithetical to underlying norms is, Walzer argues, both always possible and the most powerful form of criticism because it shows people that they are failing to live up to standards to which they feel they ought to live up. Justice, Walzer holds, is like the mirror Hamlet shows his mother: both our mirror and our critic (Walzer 1988a: 151–2). The most distinctive feature of Walzer’s political theory is this quest to combine the interpretive search for meaning with the egalitarian commitment to reform. This is a characteristically Dissentian project, reflecting the desire to develop a brand of social democracy that is in some respects indigenous to the United States. In this regard it is noteworthy that the magazine, too, has frequently faced criticisms on the grounds that it does not dissent from American liberalism as much as it proclaims to (see for example Glazer 1954, Podhoretz 1958; for discussion, Bloom 1986: 285–90, Jumonville 1991: 83–6, Wald 1987: 311–43). I give a mixed assessment of Walzer’s balancing act. I seek to show that Walzer’s theory of complex equality (Walzer 1983) contains the seeds of a genuinely critical interpretive theory but that Walzer’s pluralism is on occasion in tension with his egalitarianism.

      In short, Walzer’s significance is both political and theoretical. He represents a strand of social democracy that emphasizes the importance of community and the particularity of political debate, as well as the inevitability of ongoing contestation, and insists that theoretical debate be conducted in conversation with social movements. Relatedly, he insists that political theory as an enterprise be both multi- and inter-disciplinary, going beyond philosophy into an array of social-scientific fields and resembling public-intellectual analysis. The remainder of this introduction surveys Walzer’s career and provides a chapter outline of the book.

Walzer’s Career⁶

Walzer was born in March 1935 to first-generation Jewish immigrants from Austrian Galicia and Belarus and raised in the Bronx. His parents read PM, a left-wing newspaper that supported the Popular Front against fascism. In 1944, the family moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania where his father had been offered a job as manager in a jeweler’s store. The major industry in Johnstown was Bethlehem Steel, and so Johnstown gave Walzer his first encounter with union politics. He went to Brandeis to study in 1952. As a university named after the first Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court, Brandeis was sponsored by the Jewish community. Its President, Abram Sachar, recruited radical faculty who, because of the anti-communism of the time inspired by Joseph McCarthy, could not get jobs elsewhere. Most notable was the Frankfurt School theorist, Herbert Marcuse, whose influence on the student body was enormous. However, Walzer felt that Marcuse’s critique of American society was too strong (Walzer 1988a: 170–90), so when he met Coser and Howe, who also taught at Brandeis and who rejected both McCarthyism and communism, he found them inspirational. Thanks to their influence, Walzer started writing for Dissent, which they had recently founded, and told his parents that his new career plan was to be an intellectual, not a lawyer. While still an undergraduate, Walzer received a grant to assist Howe and Coser on a book project criticizing the American Communist Party (Howe and Coser 1962).

      After graduation, Walzer received a Fulbright Fellowship and spent 1956 to 1957 at Cambridge, where he began to research English Puritanism, which was to become his PhD topic, and reported on British politics for Dissent (Walzer 1957, 1958a). Dissent was particularly interested in the British Labour Party as a model СКАЧАТЬ