After analyzing Walzer’s theory of complex equality, Govert Den Hartogh claims that Walzer’s importance lies in his “effective way of doing applied ethics without theory” (Den Hartogh 1999: 518). I think this claim encapsulates vividly much of the reception of Walzer within political theory and philosophy (see in particular Galston 1984: 331–2). Certainly, in the common reading, Walzer offers brilliant insight into many important topics, offering challenging and innovative suggestions that illuminate their subjects and cast into relief the fault-lines of theoretical debates. On the other hand, his work is just so messy, lacking the precise definitions, the tight conceptual argumentation, and the careful interconnectedness that characterizes much of the most cutting-edge research in the field. Now, there is some truth to Den Hartogh’s claim. Walzer does indeed eschew a “Grand Theory” of justice in the traditional philosophical style, rejecting the attempt to “expound morality from the ground up” (Walzer 2015a: xxvii) in favor of reinterpreting the implications of our existing values and judgments. Moreover, no reader of Walzer can doubt that he rarely offers detailed or precisely formulated definitions of the concepts with which he works, from war through community and equality to social democracy and liberalism. Indeed, when I interviewed him for this book and asked him how he understood politics, he told me that he thinks it a mistake to define terms too rigidly, and added that Louis Hartz, one of his professors in graduate school, had advised against defining terms.
Where this view of Walzer goes wrong, I think, is in its assessment. It seems to take it that Walzer makes an important contribution to political theory in spite of his relative lack of philosophical precision (see, for example, Agnafors 2010: 4–6). That is why several critics have sought to reconstruct Walzer’s arguments to bolster their conceptual framework (for examples, see Van der Veen 1999 and Den Hartogh 1999). In this book, I have argued that, to the contrary, Walzer’s importance lies in his deliberate eschewal of philosophical system building on the grounds that “the moral world is much less tidy than most moral philosophers are prepared to admit” (Walzer 2007: 302). Walzer offers a political theory that is not only different in tone and conclusion than that of much analytic philosophy – especially in the Rawlsian tradition – but different in intent, aim, research method, and attitude. Walzer is important in offering a social-democratic alternative to the liberalism of Rawls, and in insisting on a situated approach to political theory.
Indeed, it is because of his commitment to a type of social democracy rooted in the public-intellectual world of New York in the 1950s that he adopted the approach that he did. Walzer was a social-democratic public intellectual from his earliest years and he became a political theorist so as to advance the sort of argument he made for Dissent as a career. Throughout his career, his political theory has attempted to advance a version of that position, seeking to carve out within the academy room for social democracy that sits alongside liberalism, just as Howe and Coser had to try to situate Dissent alongside Partisan Review. Walzer’s situated approach makes him particularly quick to spot areas of emerging importance. Indeed, his most famous contribution, Just and Unjust Wars, depended on his interests in World War II and especially Vietnam, while his work on multiculturalism, civil society, and, viewed from the perspective of 2019, socialized healthcare in the US also emerged out particular concerns and demonstrate the foresight that a situated approach can generate.
Walzer’s incorporation of narrative social-science disciplines shows us that philosophers can learn from other fields without losing critical insight. Walzer’s account suggests that we need a more context-sensitive and pluralistic theory that recognizes the distinctiveness of the parts of social life for which it will develop normative principles. This is why Wars proceeds mostly by way of historical example, Spheres by using anthropology, and Walzer’s work on complex equality in the USA by appeal to sociology. A sociological political theory such as Walzer’s takes its starting point from the social meanings that already exist and proceeds with reference to them (Walzer 1980c, 1977). This is not just because arguments are more likely to gain purchase if they are socially situated, although that is important on Walzer’s account (Walzer 1988a: 151–2). It is also because such an approach allows more room for the pluralism that is central to Walzer’s worldview than do non-contextual theories. Now, this does not mean that alternative forms of political theory must abandon analytic philosophy. Walzer certainly does not argue that. Rather, he suggests both caution about its use and the addition of other conceptual and political tools (see especially Walzer 2015a: 335–46). Analytic philosophy is one approach that Walzer and other political theorists use, but it does not exhaust the conceptual apparatus of the field.
In Chapter 8, I called this method critical conventionalism because Walzer’s fame is based in large part on using social meanings to argue for political conclusions radically at odds with common understandings. These include conceptual revisions such as his invocation of a supreme-emergency exemption to principles of jus in bello and reworking of the Doctrine of Double Effect and contentious political stances from opposition to Vietnam through to qualified support for Israel in the Middle East. This suggests that the crucial distinction between Walzerian interpretivism and the philosophical invention of John Rawls or Robert Nozick is this: Walzer’s conclusions are his own invention but they are a social, not a priori, invention, as they are justified with reference to existing, not ideal, meanings. So, in Interpretation, Walzer distinguishes between “invention de novo,” where philosophers deduce principles from their design procedure, and the “minimalist invention” that he takes interpretation to require (Walzer 1987: 19). Walzer invents principles by seeking to interpret and criticize a body of conventions. Rawls, by contrast, invents them using a design procedure. Now, of course Rawls does not imagine that we can or should literally ignore our attachments – indeed, the point of the original position is to make us think from everyone’s point of view, not from nowhere (see Okin 1989: 89–109 for detailed insistence on this point). However, Rawls proceeds by constructing normative principles rather than reflecting on, or interpreting, existing ones and seeking to improve them. By contrast, Walzerian interpretivism queries the plausibility of Rawls’s distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, suggesting that insofar as such a distinction makes conceptual sense, the ideal must emerge out of the actual, rather than the actual being taken as an adaptation to non-ideal circumstances of what we really ought to do and believe.
Walzer claims that interpretive theory is better understood by analogy with art, broadly understood, than with philosophy (Walzer 1994a: 52). What that means is that it takes social meanings as a sort of text and seeks to produce interpretations of those texts that are right for particular contexts, not right per se (52–3). One implication of this study of Walzer is that political-theory research ought itself to be pluralistic, abandoning the search for final answers in favor of temporary persuasion. This is because the idea that most importantly underlies Walzer’s work is what in Chapter 3 I called the social-meaning thesis, derived from Clifford Geertz. This states that meaning emerges out of cultural and political interaction and cannot be deduced either from a natural order or from pure reason. In this view, human beings become the people they are because of the social construction of meaning, and they need a protected collective space to engage in the continuing project of debating social norms and practices within the context of a common life. The argument that meaning is social suggests that political theory must participate in public debate and that politics is dependent on social meanings for its terms of reference. Contemporary Walzerians, then, will take their starting point from political events – Syria, right-wing populism, movements for socialized medicine, environmental change – rather than from conceptual ones such as Rawls’s Difference Principle, Nozick’s invocation of Locke’s state of nature, or the utility principle.
Walzer’s argument for a politically engaged political theory also means paying more attention than do Rawlsians to collective action and to sustaining traditions of public discourse that can empower citizen bodies. Walzer’s major statement of this argument, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1981), is extremely prescient in anticipating some of the themes of what is now called “realist” political theory, which has also criticized liberal theory in the mode of analytic philosophy on grounds similar to those of Walzer. This realism must not be confused with the realist critique of just-war theory that Walzer made his name criticizing, so it may be helpful to think of it as “new realism.” It is one of the growth areas in political theory in the last decade. New realists do not argue that moral standards are wholly inapplicable to politics, but rather that political theory must leave room for democratic decision-making rather than seeking to resolve debates (Williams 2005: 3, Galston 2010: 390–4, Larmore 2013: 294–8). Many have taken this argument to be that politics is an autonomous realm to which the dictates of morality do not apply, which would make it a variant on the old realism. However, I take it that realism’s demand is that coercion be legitimate, which is itself a moral demand (Sleat 2014: 316–23). This means that what new realists argue is that political theorists should not stipulate normative principles or spend time “debating the fine print of [Rawls’s] Difference Principle,” but should focus on “the contexts and processes through which … the citizenry address shared problems” (Galston 2010: 394).
That is precisely the argument that Walzer made in “Philosophy and Democracy,” in which he argued that many Rawlsians – but not Rawls himself – were too keen to implement or enact the truths discovered by political philosophy without regard to the people’s claim to rule (Walzer 1981: 5–7). Walzer argued that this was inimical to democratic practice, because the “people have a right to act wrongly” (7). He made the striking claim that attempts to restrain democracy by ensuring that small groups review popular decision-making – for example, using the US Supreme Court to guarantee rights – was akin to Lenin’s vanguard party (9–14). Walzer argued instead for judicial and philosophical restraint, insisting that “philosophical validation and political authorization are two entirely different things” (19; Walzer 1984), which is why philosophers have no political authority. Walzer’s method, like that of new realists, suggests that political theorists should be epistemically modest, that analytic liberalism leaves insufficient room for political action (Geuss 2008), focuses too much on ideal theory (Larmore 2013: 283–4), and is insufficiently immersed in political life (Williams 2005: 77). Furthermore, Walzer suggests that abstract theory may encourage top-down politics, frequently lamenting the a- or anti-political nature of much philosophy. Here, too new realists have made similar arguments. For example, Bernard Williams argued that morality must not be prior to politics (2005: 135), preferring instead “bottom-up” politics that begins from where a community is, not where the theorist says it should be (Williams 2005: 61, Galston 2010: 395–6). The danger is that abstract theory may ignore local political disagreements, which is problematic because the ubiquity of disagreement is “the essence of politics” (Williams 2005: 77–8). As Walzer puts it, disagreements can be resolved only temporarily, and only politically (Walzer 1986b: 79–80).
This does not mean, however, that “Walzer is a new realist.” As with the older label of “communitarian,” discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the linkage both reveals important commonalities in theoretical position and obscures important differences. With regard to realism, Walzer’s social-meaning thesis adds at least two important elements to the realist position. First, it supports a broadly applicable method for political theory that stretches from distributive justice to the ethics of war and beyond, that of critical conventionalism. Second, Walzer’s thesis offers us a way to close the gap between politics and morality in many realist accounts of legitimacy (see Sleat 2014 for another account). The argument that meaning is social suggests that political theory must connect to public debate without positing the autonomy of politics from morality: value, on Walzer’s account, follows from meaning, so morality, too, is social. Walzer ties the arguments for politics and democracy to cultural pluralism in ways that can inform realism. Much literature on Walzer tries to diminish or downplay his particularism, seeking to hold on to his major insights while jettisoning the interpretive framework in favor of some sort of incorporation into a universalistic position. By contrast, I view Walzer’s particularism as one of the major contributions of his work, as I argued in Chapter 3, as it offers an important alternative to the universalism of much analytic political theory.
Another way in which Walzer is not a new realist is that, in some ways, he clings to a political idealism that derives from his long association with Dissent and his long commitment to social democracy. For example, several years ago he argued that political theorists ought to seek to regain elements of the utopian tradition (Walzer 2012c). What this points to, I think, is that no externally imposed label is going to define Walzer’s theory. We get closest to understanding by thinking of him on his own terms, as a social democrat operating within a tradition of discourse on the American near-left that emerges out of New York intellectual life. Walzer’s identification as a social democrat does suggest political commonality with the new realism, too, for Bernard Williams long embraced a similar position in the UK, a country in whose Labour Party Walzer and Dissent have long taken an interest. Bearing in mind that Walzer adopted the meaning-dependence thesis of Spheres, the second most important argument in arguably his major work, from Williams, this suggests important overlap between the two men’s thought.
Overall, though, Dissent is the primary influence on Walzer. He is so much a Dissentnik that one commentator even claimed that, at times, “he seems mainly a younger version of [Irving] Howe” (Krupnick 1989: 691). From Howe, Walzer borrowed a political position that attempts to use the values of American liberalism to argue for reform of American capitalism in the direction of social democracy and a theoretical justification of the importance of working within democratic norms that formed the basis for Walzer’s work on social criticism. Like Walzer, Howe was frequently criticized for being insufficiently radical. After Howe’s death, Walzer assumed his position both as Dissent’s lead editor and as the voice of the American democratic left, leading him to the arguments with much of the rest of the left during the Bush Administration discussed earlier. Given what I have said about Walzer’s method and his contributions, I think we can acquit them of the charge of using an approach that does not make critical insight likely or even possible, for their view is merely that social democracy must appeal to the particular interests of the oppressed and must reject Leninist vanguardism.
However, the question remains how we should assess Walzer’s political positions. Throughout the book, I have noted the discrepancy between Walzer’s stated leftism and much of his reception. Edward Said put the point most starkly when he argued that, although Walzer uses the language of the left, his theory “scuttles” left-wing arguments of their theoretical depth and critical insight (Said 1986: 104). This is a problem in the theory of justice, where Walzer’s refusal to define the nature of equality at less than book length has led critics to reject the idea of complex equality because Walzer offers no objective metric by which to measure equality (Arneson 1995, in particular). Yet if Walzer is right that equality is a political relationship and that relations of domination and oppression can be ended by spherical separation, this may be a feature, not a bug, of Walzer’s theory. Politically, Walzer endorses many positions long associated with social democracy, from an enhanced and more active welfare state, through expansion of the remit of democracy to the economy and the workplace, to greater political action on the part of local interest groups in civil society. A bigger problem may be the refusal to define the communities he has in mind. I noted in Chapter 5 that Walzer’s insistence on the legitimacy of border restrictions puts his pluralism and his egalitarianism in tension. If he is right about the complex nature of the contemporary self, with its myriad partial attachments (Walzer 1994a: 85–104), then even on his own terms, the need for closure between communities may not be so great as he suggests. We are not now wholly of any one community, and so draw our identity from multiple, overlapping sources. Following Lewis Coser, Walzer accepts that no one attachment should dominate the others. Yet closed borders may privilege national community over any other in a way that makes for dominance – on Walzer’s terms, the gravest threat to equality. Especially in 2019, in the era of the border wall, it seems that leftists should tread very carefully indeed if they are to endorse closed borders. It must be remembered, however, that Walzer argues for borders that are more open than those of any existing country.
Walzer’s insistence on the legitimacy of border restrictions is, it seems clear, a point at which his theory of complex equality merges with his defense of Israel. For Walzer argues that it amounts to the claim that each nation is entitled to try to ensure its own continuance over time: “no one expects the French … to allow themselves to become a minority in their own country” (Walzer 2014a: 171). The problem here is that France understands itself to be a nation-state, yet on Walzer’s account, nation-states have more trouble tolerating minorities than do immigrant societies. This means that if Israel is to base itself on the French model, difficulty in tolerating its Arab minority, let alone coming to terms with Palestinian statehood, must be expected. In fact, Walzer treats France as a hybrid of two models, because it is also “Europe’s leading immigrant society” (Walzer 1997a: 37), and suggests that recent immigrants to France may be looking for something akin to the Ottoman millet system for which he has sympathy (40, see discussion in Chapter 5). He accepts that Israel is an even more complicated multicultural case and argues both for the right of Palestinians to national independence and of Israeli Arabs to multicultural accommodation in Israel (40–3). Walzer notes in a forthcoming manuscript, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism,” that Israel’s Arab citizens are particularly discriminated against in housing and education, and that the Nation-State Law unjustly condemns them to second-class citizenship. Yet for all that Walzer is critical of right-wing Zionism, his overriding political commitment is to a reformed version of Israel that is shorn of the occupied territories. Walzer rejects as a “chimera” any version of a one-state solution, on the grounds that both Palestinians and Israelis want national self-determination (Walzer 1972). In Chapter 7, I suggested that this position is in line with his general reliance on social meanings. However, it has proven his most controversial stance on the left, more even than Walzer’s argument that the USA is a hegemonic but not an imperial power (Walzer 2018: 77–97). The key question is whether support for Israel, even qualified support, is compatible with a type of leftist position.
It is worth remembering that, prior to 1967, many on the left did support Israel, and that, like Walzer, many of the founding figures in the state’s establishment were Labor Zionists. Moreover, Walzer has posed the right challenge, I think, when he says that the test of Israeli nationalism, as of that of Algeria, India, and every other nation, is the nation that comes next. The problem is that it might be a challenge that cannot be met within the confines of the nation-state system. Israel and Palestine are so small and densely populated that thinking of dividing them into two states reminds me of the story of Solomon who, when asked by two women to adjudicate which is the true mother of a newborn baby, suggested cutting the baby in half, so as to test which will put the baby’s interests ahead of her own. At the theoretical level, Walzer’s social-meaning thesis suggests that identity is a product of social construction and so provides a powerful defense of protected space in which communities can live a common life. However, when two communities inhabit the same area, we need to think very carefully. There are of course no answers – easy or otherwise – to the Middle East problem, but it may be worth considering one that Walzer explicitly rules out and thinking of Israel and Palestine as a consociation (Walzer 1997a: 41). Consociations are states in which two or more nations are roughly equally numerous, so the state devises power-sharing arrangements to allow for collective self-determination without secession. Belgium and Switzerland are important consociations. Walzer treats consociations as an alternative regime of toleration to nation-states and immigrant societies, noting that they are something like liberal-democratic heirs of the multinational empires such as the Ottoman Empire’s millet system (22–4). In a consociation, toleration is made easier by the absence of an imperial overlord that could interfere between the millets. No doubt there are myriad difficulties in the way of consociationalism in the Middle East, but for a contemporary Walzerian, thinking through the possibilities might provide a way of helping with the test of the nation that comes next.
To think of the question as a social critic of Walzer, we should note that any solution in the Middle East can only be worked out politically. In this light, his contribution to political theory stands regardless of whether he is right on Israel or on any one particular issue. For it is intrinsic to Walzer’s work that there are no right answers in the traditional philosophical sense; that is, answers that are permanent, timeless, and universally applicable. To be precise, Walzer accepts that it may be possible to deduce such answers philosophically but insists that they be subordinated to political decision-making. This makes his contribution to political theory of the utmost importance, for it seeks – to adapt language of his I discussed in Chapter 8 – to give more independent force to the adjective (“political”) than in most political theory. His interdisciplinary, sociological approach promotes mutual learning and discussion across the barriers of the academy and beyond.
In that sense, Walzer’s work really does resemble the public-intellectual work of Howe, Coser, Harrington, and the rest of Dissent’s founding generation. Due to anti-Semitism in the mid-century American academy, most early Dissentniks were unable to find academic employment until deep into the 1950s, by which time they had been writing for New York intellectual magazines for between a decade and two decades. In such articles, the authors tended to presuppose a broadly educated, sympathetic audience whom they sought to persuade using arguments that they thought widely acceptable (and rhetoric that was as powerful as they could make it – a key reason why, as many have noted, Walzer developed such an impressive prose style). This milieu demanded ecumenical writing and disdained excessive attention to precise definition – for in an intellectual community such as that of the New York Intellectuals, participants knew roughly what each other meant by particular terms. Echoing this, Walzer often talks of citizens as roughly equal, social meanings as roughly shared, and so on. Yet it is important to note that one of the common stories of American intellectual life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is of the decline of public-intellectual work (see for example Furedi 2004). On this account, generalist public intellectuals were squeezed out by the process of academic specialization, with the result that scholars write for audiences who share few presuppositions, rely heavily on jargon, and can barely understand work in other departments or even in different fields of the same department.
I want to suggest that Walzer’s importance as a political theorist is in part as a corrective to that story. He tries to write as a public intellectual, wherever possible. There are of course limits to this. While he does not decide on a venue for a publication until a draft is finished, if he does choose an academic outlet, he goes back to the text, adding footnotes and “muddying” the prose, because academic journals tend not to take writing seriously if it is too accessible. Nobody can stand in the way of a general social trend, certainly not someone whose major contribution is that meaning derives from society. At times, his attempts to make political theory like public-intellectual writing can make Walzer seem like King Canute trying to stem the tide of more and more abstract analytic theory with wilder and wilder hypothetical examples or even more abstruse post-modernism. Yet for all that, it is important that Walzer makes the attempt and that he models what political theorists in the 2020s and beyond might do. Perhaps we cannot be public intellectuals today, although the rise of online long-form commentary may be a step in that direction. No doubt, whenever conditions for public-intellectual work are more propitious again, the nature of a public intellectual will have changed markedly. The meaning of a public intellectual, too, must be socially dependent. However, with the sort of steady work that Walzer engages in deep into his eighties, perhaps we can do what we can to set that future stage.