Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

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СКАЧАТЬ socialists. From 1957 to 1961, Walzer was a graduate student of government at Harvard University. His advisor, Samuel Beer, both gave him his first teaching experience and taught him the method of comparative history that Walzer used in his early academic work (Walzer 1965, 1974). This method, testing theories by comparison between different historical periods, is an ancestor of Walzer’s approach in Just and Unjust Wars. In his last year at Harvard, Dissent sent Walzer to North Carolina to report on the sit-in protests against segregation that were to kickstart the civil-rights movement. Walzer also organized a New Left club at Harvard, and engaged in community organizing in support of the burgeoning civil-rights movement, including picketing Woolworths.

Walzer took up his first teaching position, at Princeton University, in 1962. This spell lasted only four years, and included a second year in the UK in 1964, but is important in Walzer’s intellectual development because while there he made the friendship of the philosophers Robert Nozick and Stuart Hampshire. Nozick introduced him to the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF), a discussion club that Walzer credits with providing him with his training in philosophy (Walzer 2007: 304–5). Through SELF, Walzer also met John Rawls some years before Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971). Walzer found SELF particularly appealing because his interests were moving away from his early academic work in the history of ideas, yet few politics departments at the time taught contemporary theory. Also appealing was that SELF was influential in American philosophy’s reengagement with public affairs and politics. However, Walzer found the use of increasingly far-fetched hypothetical examples by some members of SELF frustrating,⁷ and sought to combine philosophical analysis with narrative history and sociological insight. While at Princeton, Walzer published his PhD thesis as his first book, The Revolution of the Saints (1965).

      In 1966, Walzer returned to Harvard as a professor. While there, he became increasingly involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement and determined to write a book justifying his opposition to it. He had been interested in military ethics all his life, because he was a Jewish boy who grew up during World War II. Thanks to Hampshire’s encouragement, Walzer’s second book, Obligations (1970a), considers moral issues relating to war, including treatment of prisoners-of-war and conscription. Walzer spent most of the 1970s working on Just and Unjust Wars, but also published a handbook for movement activists (Walzer 1971a) and his final major work of comparative history, a defense of the moderate party in the French Revolution – the Girondins – against the more radical Jacobins (Walzer 1974). Walzer published Wars with Basic Books, because one of their editors, Martin Kessler, heard him give a lecture on the justification of fighting World War II (for a version of which, see Walzer 1971b), and encouraged him to publish his manuscript with Basic. This was the start of a long relationship: Basic also published Spheres of Justice and The Company of Critics.

      Walzer became co-editor of Dissent with Irving Howe in 1975, around the time that he began to take regular trips to Israel. Now, he goes every year to attend the Hartman Institute’s Annual Philosophy Conference (see discussion in Chapter 7). Walzer is also a member of the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Walzer taught classes at Harvard on a broad array of topics, including nationalism, moral obligation, socialist thought, and the history of literature, including Shakespeare’s account of different political systems.⁸ Of particular importance was the class that he co-taught with Nozick in 1970–1971, in which Nozick defended capitalism and Walzer socialism. This class became the basis of both their later books on the subject (Walzer 1983; Nozick 1974).

On the back of the success of Wars, Walzer was appointed Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1980. The position came with no teaching obligations, so Walzer has devoted the rest of his career to writing, and his already prolific output soon became a flood. Around the time he moved, Walzer published Radical Principles (1980b), a collection of essays on social democracy originally written for Dissent and other public-intellectual venues. It reflects on Walzer’s experience with the New Left movement politics of the 1960s, the emergence of the New Right in the 1970s, and prospects for democratic socialism in the US after the demise of the New Left. The most significant theoretical essay is “In Defense of Equality” (1973a), which is Walzer’s first published statement of his social-democratic theory, complex equality. After he finished Wars, Walzer devoted himself to revisiting the theory, which is the basis of Spheres of Justice (1983). One important change to the theory after “In Defense” is increased emphasis on social meanings in Spheres. This reflects the influence of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Walzer’s colleague at the Institute with whom he had lunch regularly. Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures (1973) influenced Walzer greatly, suggesting the importance of the social construction of meaning (for discussion, see Reiner 2016).⁹

      Two years after Spheres, Walzer published Exodus and Revolution (1985), his personal favorite among his books because the exodus story has fascinated him since his bar mitzvah – his Torah portion was on the golden calf and the purge of the idolaters. Exodus is Walzer’s first major work on Jewish thought, and is also significant in that it resulted in a heated debate between Walzer and Edward Said, who criticized Walzer’s account of the exodus as a thinly veiled defense of Israel at all costs (Said 1986, see exchange of letters in Hart 2000). In the late 1980s, the Palestinian Intifada led Walzer to devote increased attention to criticizing terrorist modes of resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories (which he also opposed). Walzer’s defense of Israel, and the controversies it has occasioned, will crop up throughout this book. I discuss it at greatest length in the conclusion.

Walzer spent most of the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s developing a theoretical justification of the interpretive method he used in Spheres, determined to prove that philosophical interpretation was compatible with the social-democratic project of radical, egalitarian critique. The most significant statement of this justification is Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987), while The Company of Critics (1988) considers some of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century and tests the theory against their practice. Walzer praises such leftists as Albert Camus, George Orwell, and Ignazio Silone for practicing what he calls “connected criticism,” which combines commitment to a community with commitment to its reform (Walzer 1988a: 101–52). By contrast, he is critical of radicals such as Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault for practicing what Walzer considers alienated or oppositional criticism (153–209). Walzer characterizes this most emphatically in the claim that Foucault’s political positions were “less an endorsement than an outrunning of the most radical argument in any political struggle” (192). Walzer’s work on interpretive method also attempted to reconcile the particularism of that method with his appeal to human rights in Wars. In Thick and Thin (1994), he argues that a thin universal morality always co-exists with a thicker particular morality, with military ethics relying on the former and distributive justice on the latter (Walzer 1994a: 1–20; see also Walzer 1990a). In 1993, on the death of Irving Howe, Walzer and new co-editor Mitchell Cohen, who was also working on reconciling universal and particular values (see Cohen 1992), assumed increased responsibilities at Dissent.

      The collapse of the USSR and the new waves of immigration to the USA prompted Walzer to turn his attention in the 1990s to questions of cultural diversity and civil society, which also helped him clarify his relationship with the communitarian moment in political theory. This was his major focus in that decade. However, after September 11, 2001, Walzer resumed focus on just wars, and engaged in heated critique of mainstream left responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center (Walzer 2002a, 2003, 2004b). In 2018, he published A Foreign Policy for the Left, which collates and updates many of the essays that this engagement occasioned. He has spent much of the last two decades working on Jewish political theory, co-editing a collaborative project on The Jewish Political Tradition, of which three volumes have been published (Walzer et al. 2000, 2003, 2018; see also Walzer 2012a).

      Although Walzer retired as Dissent СКАЧАТЬ