Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

relates Walzer’s work on religion, and especially on the Jewish political tradition, to his secular political theory. In doing so, it demonstrates greater continuity in his worldview over the decades than most interlocutors have noticed. This leads us into Chapter 8, which focuses on Walzer’s interpretive method and social criticism. This chapter suggests that a coherent method, which I call critical conventionalism, underlies much of Walzer’s work and makes an important contribution to the field. The seemingly greater particularity of his distributive justice reflects differences in the scope of the subject matter: because most wars are engaged in across communal boundaries, the moral world of war is the product of international interaction to a greater degree than that of domestic politics. In each case, however, Walzer’s appeal is to meanings we have already created prior to theoretical investigation but that are neither natural nor universal. Finally, in concluding, I argue that Walzer’s importance is both in offering a social-democratic alternative to the liberalism that dominates Anglophone political theory and in his situated, interdisciplinary approach. This means that Walzer is not an insightful if untidy analytic political theorist, as he is often read (see for example, Agnafors 2010: 4–6, Den Hartogh 1999), but someone who seeks to extend the methodological resources of analytic political theory, to challenge some of its recurrent assumptions, and to bring it into conversation with other fields of study and with political and public-intellectual debate.

Notes

1 Rawls uses the Latin – sub specie aeternitatis – which he defines as incorporating “all social” and “all temporal” viewpoints (Rawls 1971: 587), which is a way of avoiding the particularity of perspective. 2 Interview with author, April 19, 2010. 3 While any account of so broad an approach is a simplification, the key assumptions of analytic philosophy are, roughly, as follows: “1 There is a reality independent of human knowledge of which we human beings are part. 2 Reason and method, particularly as exemplified in science, offer us the proper way to explore that reality and our relationship to it. 3 In this exploration traditional preconceptions – in particular, traditional evaluative preconceptions – should be suspended and the facts allowed to speak for themselves” (Pettit 2012: 5). 4 For versions of this criticism, see Warnke 1993, Bounds 1994, Roberts 1994, Bader 1995, Orlie 1999, Balfour 1999, Erskine 2007, Levy 2014. 5 This has been particularly true in recent years, when Walzer has spent much energy arguing with the rest of the left (Walzer 2002a, 2003, 2018). 6 The information in this section is based on a series of interviews I conducted with Walzer in 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. 7 Consider, for example, Nozick’s statement of his approach in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick 1974: x). 8 See Walzer’s interesting reflection on Julius Caesar and the question of assisted suicide as it relates to Brutus (Walzer 1975a). 9 Walzer had begun to engage with Geertz’s work even before joining the Institute. See Walzer 1967a, and my discussion in Chapters 3 and 7.

1 The Justice of Resorting to War

      Walzer was interested in justice in war from childhood, with his longest piece of young writing focusing on World War II, which he continues to view as the paradigm of a just war. His first book, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), ends with a chapter on Puritan attempts to rework the Catholic just-war theory of the Middle Ages so as to allow for revolutionary wars that create a holy republic (268–99; see also Walzer 1963a, 1963b, 1968a). Throughout the 1960s, his opposition to the American war in Vietnam led him to invoke just-war arguments in justification of his position (see especially Walzer 1967b, also, Walzer 1966a, 1966b 1969, 1970a). But it is with the publication of Just and Unjust Wars in 1977 that Walzer really made a name for himself on the subject. Wars is not only Walzer’s most systematic study of the ethics of war but his most famous contribution to political and international relations theory per se: it has sold as many copies as all of Walzer’s other books combined.¹ Wars remains of the utmost importance to Walzer’s career as, although some of his positions have developed over the years,² the basic framework of analysis he introduces in the book continues to guide both his work on just wars and that of many other scholars (as noted by, among others, Lichtenberg 2008: 112, Orend 2013: vii–viii). Wars, and the literature it created, is thus the focus of the next two chapters. My division follows Walzer’s own. He notes that there is a distinction between the moral considerations that govern the outbreak of war (jus ad bellum) and those that apply to conduct during war (jus in bello).³ This chapter thus considers both Walzer’s argument that just-war theory is a plausible endeavor and his account of the justice of resorting to war.

I start by setting Walzer’s work in its context. This is twofold. First, his thought about justice in war developed out of his involvement in the left-liberal or democratic-socialist branch of the anti-Vietnam War movement (Howe and Walzer 1979: 16) and seeks to advance core commitments of that movement. Second, Walzer wanted to “rediscover the just war for political and moral theory” (Walzer 2015a: xxvi) by rebutting objections from both realists, who hold that moral judgments are inapplicable during war, and pacifists, who argue that no war can be just. I show that Walzer’s major contribution to theorizing about the justice of resorting to war is twofold. First, unlike earlier notions of just war that developed out of Christian theology, Walzer’s basis is human rights to life and liberty (Walzer 2015a: xxviii). This brings the theory in line with contemporary ethics, in particular in the insistence that all just wars must be defensive. Second, unlike much recent just-war theory that uses almost exclusively the tools of contemporary philosophy, Walzer situates his account in military history and practice, claiming that these give war a “moral reality” (3–48) that includes a “war convention” (127–221) that is the appropriate guide to just-war thinkers. Walzer calls his method “casuistic,” meaning that he advances his argument through a series of historical cases and insists that it is important that the cases be historical ones rather than hypotheticals (xxviii). The historical basis of Walzer’s just-war theory reflects his determination to offer a politically engaged account (Nardin 2013). It also means that the theory overlaps in significant, and often unrecognized, ways with Walzer’s broader corpus, as both focus on interpretation and critical scrutiny of existing norms. The chapter concludes by considering Walzer’s account of exceptions to the principle that cross-border aggression is never justified, focusing in particular on humanitarian intervention.

Against Vietnam

Just-war theory is now a thriving cottage industry and a mainstay of syllabi in global ethics. During the Vietnam War, while Walzer was writing Wars, however, the dominant notion was that justice in war was a sort of category mistake. We should not overstate this: in his first major work on military ethics, Walzer argued that most Americans accepted that the decision to go to war might be just or unjust but rejected restrictions on military conflict once war had begun (Walzer 1967b). Inceasingly, much of the political left tends toward pacifism, or at least to rejection of the use of force by the USA, fearing a sort of neo-imperialism cloaked in just-war language.

      As a result, even while participating in the movement against the American war in Vietnam, Walzer objected to most of the common arguments against that war, in particular those that sympathized with the communism of the North Vietnamese government and of the Vietcong (Howe and Walzer 1979: 15, Chomsky, Morgenthau, and Walzer 1978: 390–1). While the USA would have been entitled to support an indigenous anti-communist movement – indeed, Walzer would have done so himself – it could not replace an indigenous communist regime with a dictatorship of its own, no matter how benevolent it felt itself to be. The “ghastliness” (Walzer 1968d: 13) of the war consisted in the combination of two particular features, on Walzer’s view. First, it was “partly an inherited colonial war” in which the USA, like colonial France before it, refused to accept the right of the Vietnamese people to collective self-determination (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). This meant that the war could not be won, because the government of North Vietnam and the Vietcong “had succeeded in appropriating the historical energies of Vietnamese nationalism” (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). Although those movements were not, Walzer insisted, part of a global progressive cause, they had the loyalty