Michael Walzer

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J. Toby Reiner. Michael Walzer

Contents

Guide

Pages

Series Title. Key Contemporary Thinkers Series includes:

Michael Walzer

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Introduction

Walzer’s Career6

Approach and Chapter Outline

Notes

1 The Justice of Resorting to War

Against Vietnam

In Defense of Just-War Theory

The Theory of Aggression

Exceptions: Civil War and Pre-Emption

Humanitarian Intervention

Notes

2 Justified Conduct in War

Non-Combatant Immunity and Double Effect

“Supreme Emergency” and the Limits of jus in bello

Terror and Threats to Civilians

The “Moral Equality of Soldiers”

Notes

3 Complex Equality and the “Spheres of Justice”

Intellectual and Political Context

Walzer’s Project

Distribution for Right Reasons

The Social-Meaning Thesis

Walzer’s Contribution

Notes

4 Complex Equality and the Social Democratic Critique of Liberalism

Political Vision

Walzer and Dissent

Socializing Democracy

Civil Society, Community, and Free Association

Complex Inequality?

Notes

5 The Challenge of Diversity

“Communities of Character”: The Case for Border Restrictions

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference

Community and Identity

Notes

6 Justice Beyond Borders

Justice After War

Global Governance and Human Rights

Global Distributive Justice

Pluralism and the Left

Notes

7 Religion and Politics

Early Work – Symbolism and Discipline in the Study of Puritanism

Religious Symbols and National Liberation

The Jewish Political Tradition

Notes

8 Interpretive Method and Social Criticism

Three Paths in Moral Philosophy

The Practice of Social Criticism

Thick and Thin: Reconciling Universal and Particular

Walzer as a Social Critic

Notes

Conclusion

Bibliography. Works by Walzer

Edited and Co-authored

Other Works

Index

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J. Toby Reiner

Andrius Galisanka has read almost everything I’ve written in the last ten or twelve years, and his advice has been incredibly helpful. I’d also like to thank Richard Ashcroft, Jason Blakely, Nina Hagel, Tim Fisken, and Tacuma Peters for their friendship and for helpful comments along the way. David Watkins, Benjamin McKean, Marcus Agnafors, Amy Linch, Geoffrey Kurtz, Leonard Feldman, and especially George Owers gave me useful advice and suggestions about portions of this manuscript or the ideas that underlie it. Steve De Wijze – my undergraduate advisor – introduced me to Michael Walzer’s work in 1998. Among my other professors, I’d like to thank Mark Bevir, Sarah Song, Shannon Stinson, and Kinch Hoekstra. Support from Dickinson College has been particularly helpful, especially the sabbatical support that enabled me to finish research on the Dissent circle in the academic year 2015–2016.

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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.

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