Walzer’s significance in political theory lies in his active embrace of the particularity of time, place, and commitment. This makes Walzer a much more political thinker than are most scholars in the field – indeed, a collected volume of his most important essays is called Thinking Politically (Walzer 2007). I will show that this is true in three interrelated yet importantly distinct ways. First, throughout his long career, Walzer has defended a position that is situated in the life of his own societies, refusing to “walk out of the cave, leave the city … [fashion] an objective and impartial standpoint” (Walzer 1983: xiv). Rather, he has operated under the assumption that political theorists have a “license,” granted to few other scholars, to stake out political positions and make contestable arguments for them (Walzer 2013a). This means that Walzer represents a type of political theory that seeks to avoid academic specialization, adopting a language that is accessible to, and continuous with, that of intellectual life more broadly. He regards it as a mistake for philosophy to seek “too much abstraction … from the real world” (Walzer 2007: 308) and insists that theorists avoid infringing on democratic prerogative (Walzer 1981). This is Walzer’s methodological contribution.
In disciplinary terms, this makes Walzer’s work highly distinctive, because he draws upon narrative fields in the social sciences as much as, or more than, the tools of philosophy on which most other political theorists rely. Walzer’s method is at core sociological, and his criticisms of important theorists such as Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert Nozick stem from their rejection of “every sort of sociological politics, where principles are derived from conventional practices” (Walzer 1980c: 39–40). Walzer’s work also often draws on history, notably in his work on justice in war, which he illuminates with examples from across several millennia of military practice, starting as far back as ancient Greece. Indeed, his most famous book, Just and Unjust Wars, is subtitled A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations because it was important to Walzer that he avoid too much reliance on the hypothetical examples to which many contemporary philosophers appeal so that his work spoke to participants in war (Walzer 2015a: xxviii–xxix; see also 335–46). In other works, his examples are anthropological and aim to illustrate differences in social, political, and moral meaning, value, and practice to illuminate Walzer’s core thesis that meaning does not inhere in nature but is always a collective product that varies across communities (see especially Walzer 1983). All of these disciplines are useful to Walzer 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.”)
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