J. Toby Reiner
polity
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Copyright © J. Toby Reiner 2020
The right of J. Toby Reiner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2629-1 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2630-7 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Names: Reiner, J. Toby, author.
Title: Michael Walzer / J. Toby Reiner.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Key contemporary thinkers series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Michael Walzer is one of the world’s most important political thinkers. In this book, Toby J. Reiner provides the most wide-ranging and up-to-date introduction to his work available. Examining Walzer’s multivarious writings and work, Reiner develops an illuminating new interpretation of his thought that no political theorist can afford to miss”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019024000 (print) | LCCN 2019024001 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509526291 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509526307 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509526338 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Walzer, Michael. | Political science--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JC251.W3 R45 2020 (print) | LCC JC251.W3 (ebook) | DDC 320.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024000
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024001
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Acknowledgments
I have been working on and thinking about Michael Walzer’s political thought for a long time – he was the subject of my PhD thesis, which I finished in 2011. More than a decade earlier, my undergraduate honors thesis used his notion of a dirty-hands dilemma to examine the war-crimes tribunal of Adolf Eichmann. In that time, I’ve acquired a lot of intellectual debts, to teachers, mentors, friends, and family.
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.
I’d also like to thank Michael Walzer himself who lived up to his reputation for generosity by meeting with me on several occasions to discuss this project and helped me to set his ideas in their historical context.
My parents, Robert Reiner and Miriam David, were my first models of intellectual life, and the work of a professor, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today without their love, mentorship, and guidance. My cats, Toasty and Couscous, helped me tremendously, reminding me at every opportunity that it was more important to feed them than to continue typing, sitting on my screen or arms if I forgot, and calming me with their purrs when the writing hit a roadblock.
Finally, my wife, Margaret Winchester, has helped me at every step of the way along the writing of this manuscript, read most of it, and is my constant support and companion. I dedicate this book to her, with love.
Dedication
For my beloved wife, Meg,
without whom I never would have finished this book.
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,