Walzer’s most famous works are pieces of secular political theory; that is, they do not appeal to divine revelation or apply to any particular religious community.1 Indeed, Walzer endorses – albeit in qualified manner – the separation between church and state, holding that the state must be neutral between religions and must tolerate the existence of a plurality of religious groups (Walzer 1999: 160–1). However, Walzer is a long-term critic of the view, common on the left, that religion is an atavistic force that will “fade away” as society progresses (147; see also Walzer 1972, 1994a: 63–84, 1994c, 2005).2 Walzer has argued throughout his career that religious ideas should be an important source of inspiration for democratic politics, including leftist movements, because religions bring “radical hope,” narratives of liberation, and “discipline for the long march” (Walzer 1999: 154; also 1985, 2015b). This helps promote the steady work that the Dissent circle advocates. Walzer’s earliest academic works sought to draw lessons for contemporary radicalism from the history of Puritanism.3 Much of his early work for Dissent drew on this research.4 In recent years, Walzer has devoted most of his attention to the Jewish political tradition, while his favorite among his books is Exodus and Revolution (1985), which attempts to use the Exodus story as a template for national-liberation movements.
Walzer’s work on religion has not attracted much attention in the recent secondary literature on his political theory (though see Honig 2014, Revering 2005). However, examination of this work furnishes us with greater insight into Walzer’s conceptions of justice, social meanings, community, and politics (see Walzer 2012a). Moreover, this work helps explain many of Walzer’s political commitments, not just to Israel, but to national liberation generally, and showcases one of the important sources of his particularism. In this chapter, I examine some of the key aspects of Walzer’s work on religion. I start with his early use of Puritanism as an example of a radical political movement, emphasizing the importance of his appeal to political symbolism. Next, I consider his account of national liberation, focusing on the Exodus story and the controversy Walzer’s use of it provoked. Finally, I examine his work on Jewish political history.
Walzer’s first book, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), conducts a study of select moments in the history of the Puritan movement in seventeenth-century England to provide insight on the process of modernization and the prerequisites of radical politics (MacCaffrey 1967: 95, Winthrop 1966). Walzer rejects Max Weber’s argument that Puritanism was the driving force behind capitalism, holding the movement to be incompatible with capitalist accumulation. He suggests instead that the significance of Puritanism was primarily political: it made possible a new form of politics in which a disciplined band of saints effected this-worldly change. Walzer concludes with a brief comparison with later secular radicals – the Jacobins of the French Revolution (on whom, see also Walzer 1974, one of Walzer’s last works in this style) and the Bolsheviks in Russia – arguing that the significance of all three was in making the crisis of their contemporary moment comprehensible. This function explains why none of the movements survived the replacement of the new crisis by a new routine or regularized form of politics (Walzer 1965: 300–20, 1970c).
As a contribution to religious history, this argument has been of modest importance at best. Indeed, even the most positive review of Revolution notes that, “Walzer’s book really engages the mind at the level of concept rather than fact” (Vann 1968: 113; see also Haller 1966). However, Walzer’s argumentation foreshadows his later work in important ways that can help us understand his interest in religion. Walzer’s claim is that, as Calvinists, the Puritans were able to construct a “theoretical justification for independent political action” that the medieval worldview probably precluded (Walzer 1965: 2–8). Medieval Europeans saw the cosmos as an organic, unchanging order grounded in natural hierarchy, but the Puritan movement appealed to a new set of symbols and images. These were suggested by the Copernican revolution that rendered Calvin’s “unmoralizing recognition of political reality” plausible (Walzer 1965: 26, 1967a: 202–3). Walzer argues that imagery enables political forms, holding that the crucial backdrop for Puritanism – and for much modern political theory (Walzer 1967a: 199–202) – was the set of scientific developments that replaced a view of the world as resting on natural hierarchy and harmony with one based on equality and disorder. Most importantly, in the new imaginary that Hobbes’s social-contract theory systematized, humans are depicted as isolated, masterless yet insecure, and likely to conflict with each other (191–201). This emphasis on symbolism suggests significant continuity in Walzer’s thought, especially with Spheres. It “forebodes the idea of social understandings as shaping our morality” (Agnafors 2010: 12). In other words, Walzer’s work on Puritanism sees him moving toward the view that the meanings that motivate human action and belief are the product of particular societies, and that they motivate us by means of symbolism.
On Walzer’s view, the relationship between widely recognized social symbols and political position is one of analogical connection, not logical deduction (Walzer 1967a: 192–3). That is, symbols give to politics a series of references to other realms of human experience, and so help make some claims more persuasive than others. Walzer argues that symbolic activity is “our most important means of bringing things together, both intellectually and emotionally, thus overcoming isolation,” which makes politics an “art of unification” (194–5). Symbolism sets rough limits to thought, ensuring that no thinker can avoid the dominant symbols of her time: no English thinker in the 200 years after Hobbes could ignore his framework, even if she sought to reject his political conclusions (201).
These arguments are a conjuncture between two major influences on Walzer. First, his PhD advisor, Samuel Beer, was the inspiration for his “ideas about the proper study of politics” (Walzer 1965: 9). Walzer had chosen his dissertation topic before he arrived at Harvard, interested in studying a group whom he considered politically radical but with whose positions he disagreed. Beer gave him a method – using history to illuminate theory and testing theory using historical cases – similar to that of Wars. Beer also influenced Walzer via his claim that human action is defined or directed by a society’s “operative ideals” (Richter 1970: 13). In Beer’s major work, British Politics in the Collectivist Age (1965), he compares different eras in British politics, arguing that historical comparison highlights important features that are too familiar for contemporaries to notice. Beer proposes that a “theory of representation” constitutes the political culture of each era, with “images and sentiments” functioning as operative ideals (Beer 1965: ix–xi). Historians must focus on particular understandings, starting with an “intentional” model of political behavior that clarifies the subjective understandings of particular subjects (Beer 1970: 48–9, 58–73, Richter 1970: 28–9). As Stephen Thernstrom, a historian who was at graduate school with Walzer and who joined Dissent’s symposium of young radicals in 1962 (“Symposium” 1962, see discussion in Chapter 4), put it, “the austerely objective facts … influence the course of history only as they are mediated through the consciousness of obstinately subjective human beings” (Thernstrom 1970: 238).
More importantly, Walzer’s work on Puritanism marks his first encounter with Clifford Geertz’s anthropology, the primary influence on Spheres. Walzer cites Geertz as the source of his view that symbols are collective products developed over long periods (Walzer 1967a: 196, referring to Geertz 1973: 193–233). Geertz argued that ideology – including that of religious groups such as the Puritans – is symbolic activity in response to cultural strain. It seeks to “render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposively,” by constructing “maps of problematic social reality” (Geertz 1973: 220). Geertz also emphasized the complexity and duration of social change. Walzer adopts both these views, arguing that Puritanism is better understood as an ideology than as a religious movement. He explains the change between symbolic systems thus:
What occurs is a slow erosion of the old symbols, a wasting away of the feelings they once evoked, an increasingly disjointed and inconsistent expression of political ideas – a nervous insistence upon the old units and references … until finally the units cease to be accepted as intellectual givens and the references cease to be meaningful. But since men [sic] cannot orient themselves in the political world without unit and reference symbols, the systems are replaced even as they are called into question.
(Walzer 1967a: 198; see Walzer 1994a: 26–31 for a later account of the long duration of cultural change; for discussion, Reiner 2016: 376–7)
As cultural change takes so long, political events often lag behind symbolic change. For example, the principle of absolute monarchical authority based on divine right was effectively destroyed long before the French Revolutionaries sacrificed King Louis to the successor principle, popular sovereignty (Walzer 1967a: 198, citing Geertz 1973: 220, n. 43; Walzer 1965: 199–200).
The crucial point to take from Walzer’s study of Puritanism is that religious symbols can be of vital importance to motivating an activist, radical politics. The disciplined political action that enabled Puritans to convert Britain, briefly, into a religious commonwealth depended on their use of the new cosmology. In much of Walzer’s later work, he has developed this point into the claim that left politics ignores religious ideas or treats them as byproducts of oppression that will be overcome in a future secular age at its peril. This argument builds on his claim that political theory must be connected to the society it aims to improve by noting that liberation can emerge only out of engagement with the people who are to be liberated. By contrast, Walzer claims, many would-be liberators seek to overcome religious ways. However, as those ways are “cherished by many of the men and women whose ways they are,” the result is a “paradox of liberation” (Walzer 2015b: 19). Secular liberation movements seek to free people from oppression but frequently encounter resistance and backsliding because ignoring the symbols that are dominant in a society “impoverish[es] political culture in a way that prevents the reproduction of stable collective identity” (Wright 2016: 436).
Walzer views this as a major blind-spot of left politics, holding that secular movements often ignore the fact that groups “enter the historical arena … with their language, religion, and age-old customs” (Walzer 1972: 495). Such groups aspire to a collective life of their own and are in that sense amenable to secular liberationists who seek to free them from oppression. However, they want that life to be an extension of their old ways, including religious ones. Walzer concludes that, “The choice of brethren and comrades cannot be dictated by abstract theory,” but must acknowledge pre-existing commitments (499). For example, Walzer argues that radical critiques of Israel misunderstand Palestinian liberation movements, thinking that Palestinians resist Israel as “universal men of the future,” when they are actually struggling for national liberation (492–3). Leftists can try to convert religious groups and nations to socialist internationalism, but Walzer recommends that a “chastened” humanism work within rather than against religious ideas (499).
In his recent book, The Paradox of Liberation (2015b), Walzer extends this argument beyond Israel to India and Algeria. He notes that the national-liberation movements in all three countries were originally mostly secularist, but that all have encountered difficulties in recent decades because of the paradox of liberation. In each case, religious backlash to secular nationalism arose within the new nation and threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the enterprise. This is because the “proving ground for every national-liberation movement is the nation or … religious group that comes next: Jews are tested by the Palestinians, the Algerian Arabs by the Berbers, and the Indians by the Muslims” (Walzer 2015b: 102). Importantly, for those critics who take Walzer to be an apologist for Israel, he concludes that, “none of the three nations is scoring very high” (102). The problem, Walzer contends, is that the secularism of the early liberation movement threatened to unmoor the nation-state from its traditions, which left a cultural vacuum that religious groups filled. Communities need a set of cultural symbols to bind them together, and such symbols can only develop organically. This means, Walzer argues, that liberation must be thought of as an “ongoing project” (146), with religious symbols gradually challenged to develop in more inclusive ways rather than being entirely rejected at a putatively foundational moment for a new, secular nation. What might have helped avoid counterrevolution was a “full-scale engagement [with traditionalist religion] early on” (132). This does not mean capitulation to conservative religious groups (see especially Walzer 2018: 136–56). Rather, Walzer’s argument is that a left politics that succeeds at cultural reproduction over time must “take the interests of traditional Hindus, Muslims, and Jews into account” (Walzer 2015b: 124). Walzer’s insistence on engaging with religious groups, and his critique of secular liberation, echoes his opposition to analytic liberalism. He takes liberation to have an end that is “open, radically uncertain,” and always temporary (133), and criticizes the attempt to negate religion, claiming such an attempt seeks to close off socially disputed questions and so partakes in a sort of anti-politics (121–5).
In other words, religious symbols are a source of storytelling power. This makes recognition of them an aspect of Walzerian interpretivism, which insists that understanding the social world requires telling a convincing story about it. Such stories may cohere to principle less than secular philosophers would like, but they are more likely to motivate mass political action and so to change the world. This is the argument that Walzer makes for the biblical story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt in Exodus and Revolution. Walzer argues that the story has been a template for national liberation across much of the Western world and is “a paradigm of revolutionary politics” (Walzer 1985: 7). Exodus inspires liberation movements because: (a) despite its religious origins, it is rooted in this world and in history, (b) it has a classic narrative structure, with beginning, middle, and end marking the transition from oppression to freedom, and (c) its message is one of radical hope (Walzer 1985: 9–17). As a template, its message is three-fold:
– first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
– second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
– third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.”
There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.
(Walzer 1985: 149)
The picture is classic Walzer: the world is unjust, but it can be remade, although only by collective political action. Walzer’s story starts with the hell that is Hebrew bondage in Egypt (19–40), moves to the purgatory of the wilderness (41–70), and only then to the paradise of the covenant with God (71–98) and the promised land (99–130). Reflecting Walzer’s this-worldly orientation, the promised land, while better, is not perfect, and there is the permanent risk of backsliding. The appeal of this-worldly accounts, Walzer argues, is that they make the escape from oppression seem possible to those who live in a world without miracles. Without this, “oppression would be experienced as an inescapable condition,” which would make moral criticism of it meaningless (21–2).
Exodus concludes with political arguments of contemporary relevance that have proven controversial. Walzer contrasts exodus politics, which seeks to remake the world collectively, with an alternative, messianic politics, that he rejects as unrealistic and undesirable (133–49). While Egyptian oppression was unlimited – and so contrasted starkly with the realistically just regime of biblical Israel in which slaves were freed after seven years (28–9) – it had its attractions, which is why the Israelites started worshipping the Golden Calf (40). The new world requires a huge commitment, and so the leadership has different goals to most Israelites: “The people, dreaming of milk and honey, are materialists; Moses and the Levites, dreaming of holiness, are idealists” (103). Walzer thus uses Exodus to rehearse his social-democratic critique of Marxism, and especially of Leninist vanguard politics, arguing that uncompromising idealism subverts the politics of liberation (see also Walzer 1980b: 201–23, 1981). Popular involvement in the movement for liberation is necessary to ensure that goals stay in line with the needs of the people whose liberation is at stake. However, messianic politics – the “great temptation of Western politics” – tries to escape from the limits of history and to guarantee “deliverance from politics” (Walzer 1985: 135–6).
The distinction between situated, piecemeal reforms and apolitical utopianism is central to Walzer’s oeuvre and partially explains his interest in the exodus story.5 Messianic politics is the sort of dream that, according to Howe and Coser, the American Communist Party engaged in when trying to force the pace of history (Howe and Coser 1962, see discussion in Chapter 4). Reading it into Jewish history, Walzer insists that, while “ecstatic messianism” (Walzer 1985: 139) is present in contemporary right-wing Israeli politics, it is “at odds with the Jewish tradition” (144), which tends toward the left (Walzer 2008). In the tradition, national liberation has been understood as overcoming internal temptations such as the Egyptian fleshpots, and not as conquering other people, such as the Canaanites (Walzer 1985: 136–44). Walzer accepts that the Bible “explicitly excluded [the Canaanites] from the world of moral concern,” but argues that most of the Jewish tradition has not done so (142). He concludes that right-wing Zionists who cite biblical passages to justify settlement on Palestinian territory are at odds with their own tradition. According to Walzer, then, exodus is also a justification for the leftist position in contemporary Israel, committed to the state’s survival as a national entity but also to independent Palestinian statehood (Walzer 1972, 2018: 32, 37–8, 118–19).
In a searing review of Exodus, Edward Said – both a Palestinian and a secularist – takes particular exception to this defense of Israel, claiming that it infects the book, and indeed Walzer’s corpus, as a whole. The critical issue at stake is that of philosophical connection and storytelling. Said argues, first, that the exodus story will not bear the weight of Walzer’s argument because Walzer’s history is too sweeping and because it is impossible fully to separate secular and divine elements in the exodus (Said 1986: 102; for discussion, Honig 2014). Second, Said claims that Walzer’s defense of Israel ignores not only the biblical passages referring to conquest of the Canaanites but also the violence of later users of the text. For example, Said takes the Puritans in New England and the Boers in South Africa to be settler-colonialists, not national liberationists (Said 1986: 90–3). Said concludes that Walzer’s account is “undialectical,” “simplifying,” “ahistorical,” and “reductive” (96; for discussion, Hart 2000: 1–8).
Said takes it that, underneath the surface argument of Exodus, Walzer’s desire is to defend Israel at all costs. He therefore argues that the book is written “from the perspective of victory” (Said 1986: 105) and that it is better to identify with an oppressed group than with one’s own, if that group is guilty of oppression. Moreover, Said insists that right-wing Zionists are correct to interpret exodus as enjoining the moral exclusion of Israel’s non-Jewish population, and concludes that, “There is no Israel without the conquest of Canaan and the expulsion or inferior status of Canaanites – then as now” (Hart 2000: 195).6 More broadly, Said rejects Walzer’s insistence on internal critique, arguing that it is preferable to condemn a community’s “evil” than to seek to reform it, even if such condemnation leads to isolation from the community (Said 1986: 102). Finally, he attacks Walzer’s leftist credentials, accepting that he uses leftist vocabulary – such as national liberation – but arguing that he is guilty of “scuttling both [leftist] theory and critical astringency” (104). This need not mean adopting an impartial view from nowhere, but it means standing for the “politics of causes,” rather than the politics of peoples that Said sees in exodus politics (104).
Said’s invocation of a politics of causes presupposes standards of value and meaning that exist outside any particular society. Walzer’s defense against Said must therefore invoke the social-meaning thesis that underlies his interpretivism, and insist that causes depend for both their meaning and their motivating force on storytelling power that must ultimately connect back to a particular set of symbols and imagery. This means insisting that causes must indeed always be defined from some particular viewpoint and defending the right of particular peoples, including religious groups, to independence, although not necessarily on their own terms. Put differently, Said’s critique points in the direction of a bi-national state in Israel and Palestine, but if Walzer is right that politics must derive from a particular cosmology, it wrongs both Israelis and Palestinians to insist that they live together in a deracinated cultural space. What both need and want is a space of their own in which they can continue to debate, worry about, and play out, their particular traditions and stories. Or, to adapt what Walzer said in 1972, the Palestinian liberation movement is not a politics of causes – Palestinians are national liberationists, not “universal men of the future” (Walzer 1972: 492–3).
Walzer’s insistence that religious groups should be engaged and reformed rather than transcended is in line with broader aspects of his thought. However, given Walzer’s insistence in Spheres – written just two years before Exodus – on understanding cultural meanings on their own terms, there is certainly something curious in his use of the exodus story, a legendary event supposed to have taken place in the Middle East 3,500 years ago, as a template for all future struggles for liberation across a set of cultures so amorphous as “the West.”7 How can exodus have a transcultural or trans-religious meaning if all meaning is internal to particular communities or traditions? Moreover, how can it be a template for national liberation, when the concept of the nation is a product of the modern age? Walzer’s work furnishes us with a couple of answers to these questions. One invokes a structural universalism that explains how opposition to oppression occurs in all cultural and religious groups (Walzer 1990a). I discuss this in Chapter 8. On this answer, different religious groups find exodus inspiring for their own reasons and use and understand it in different ways (Walzer 1994a).
The other answer delves into the nature of religious tradition. Walzer explores this primarily through his work on Jewish political thought, which has occupied most of his attention in the last decade and much of it in the previous two. Walzer studied Jewish thought because he was “bored” with a political tradition that “excluded the Jews (and lots of other people)” and because he was concerned about the reproduction of secular left politics (Walzer 2013c, 2015b: xiii–xiv).8 He concludes that the study of Jewish politics has broad implications for political analysis, because dominant within the Jewish tradition is “the experience of statelessness, of collective survival without territory or sovereignty” (Walzer 2007: 309). His study of the tradition is continuous with the claim that left politics takes a false step when it aspires to secular universalism that breaks with “tribalist” commitments (Walzer 1972, 1994a: 63–84).
Walzer’s work on the Jewish tradition stems primarily from attendance at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem’s annual Philosophy Conference starting in the early 1980s. The conference brings together secular Jewish diaspora thinkers such as Walzer with Israeli scholars who are immersed in the tradition, and attempts to create dialogue between them. Through attendance at the conference, Walzer came to the view that the Jewish tradition and secular political theory had much to teach each other. Much of his recent work seeks to explore this cross-fertilization, most importantly his service as co-editor of The Jewish Political Tradition (Walzer et al. 2000). This is an encyclopedia of Jewish political thought that presents a series of texts from an array of sources: the bible, the Talmud, Rabbinic commentaries, and philosophical writings (xxxii–xxxviii). So far, Walzer has co-edited three of four planned volumes (2000, 2003, 2018) and worked on the project for 30 years since he proposed the project to his co-editors in 1987 (Walzer et al. 2000: xvi). Walzer writes each volume’s introductory chapters, drafts the essays that introduce sections, and contributes comments. One noteworthy comment is on pluralism: Walzer provides a critique of Jewish arguments for a single correct account of moral truth and puts the case for diversity as an aid to understanding (354). Walzer insists that the Jewish tradition points to a political stance on the near left of contemporary American politics (Walzer 2008) and that engagement between the Jewish tradition and secular left politics can be mutually transformative. The Jewish Political Tradition sets out both to “retrieve” and to “criticize” the tradition to aid in this process (Walzer et al. 2000: xxiv).
First, Walzer argues, the Halakic order – which he calls the Jewish “normative system” (Walzer ed. 2006: vii), which Orthodox Jews call the body of religious laws, and which literally means the way – needs revision. This is because both the creation of Israel and Jewish citizenship rights in diasporic democracies render it obsolete: the Halakah does not prepare Jews for responsibility for the common weal (vii–viii). Recognition of tension between the tradition and sovereignty was a major feature of early Zionism, which was committed, in Walzerian fashion, both to the Jews and to their transformation (Walzer 2004d: 316–17). Revision to the Halakah would involve a shift from political passivity to active engagement with the world.
Walzer, then, is a social critic of Judaism, insisting that commitment to it requires critical engagement. He argues that Jewish activism within “universalist political movements” marks a departure from the Jewish tradition, but one that is true to its spirit, because the tradition has always been open to modification (Walzer 2001c). This spirit enables transformation, which occurs as a result of encounter with other traditions, and subsequent internal debate. For Jews to develop new ways to deal with the challenges wrought by sovereignty and inclusion, Jewish political thinking must be brought into conversation with military ethics and the study of statecraft and civil society. Moreover, the tradition has “manifold” resources for the work of renewal: the “tradition of legal interpretation and controversy … the history of the Jews, the practice of ethical storytelling (Aggadah), theological reflection, and … secular philosophy” (Walzer ed. 2006: vii). Reinterpretation is, Walzer holds, the dominant means of innovation.
Consider how bringing the Jewish tradition into conversation with just-war theory might aid in transformation.9 Walzer does this in his edited volume, Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism (2006), where he notes that the Jewish theory of war is at cross-purposes with just-war theory. This is because it classes all wars as either “commanded” or “permitted” and so misses the important category of banned or forbidden war (Walzer 2006b: 166–7; see also Walzer 1992a, 1992d, 2012a: 33–41). Moreover, the Jewish tradition lacks any “analyses of underlying principles” and any “casuistic applications” such as the historical cases Walzer uses in Just and Unjust Wars (2006b: 164–6). This renders the tradition incapable of making judgments about war and ruling some wars unjust (cf. Ravitsky 2006). Yet such judgments are crucial to the state of Israel, given the moral dilemmas posed by counter-terrorist operations and the importance of non-combatant immunity while conducting them (Walzer 2006a). This means that the tradition must absorb insight from secular just-war reasoning.
Study of the Jewish political tradition is also, Walzer holds, useful to political theorists. In taking interpretation as the main source of innovation in Judaism, Walzer restates his claim that radical change can be the product of engagement within a tradition. Walzer insists that the centerpiece of the tradition is “a radical reinterpretation or, better, a series of reinterpretations” of the meaning of the bible (Walzer et al. 2000: xxii). Like moral principles generally, Jewish ideas are the product of interpretation of a tradition marked by “intertextuality”; that is, a series of writers engaged in prolonged disagreement over many centuries (xxiii). Moreover, Walzer sees the tradition as teaching the importance of learning from history and of drawing on resources from multiple moral, cultural, and religious traditions (the planned fourth volume of The Jewish Political Tradition is on “Politics in History”). The Jewish political tradition also teaches the importance of membership in a community: volume 2 is devoted to membership, like chapter 2 of Spheres, and volume 3 to community.
Jewish focus on membership and community serve in Walzer’s work as the foundation of situated left politics, committed both to particular communities and to their transformation. This makes the Jewish tradition a source of Walzer’s commitment to the view that egalitarian politics must emerge from a tradition. His work on it does reveal that his thought is not completely contextual: his interest in the tradition is not antiquarian but is intended to “serve contemporary uses” (Walzer 2006b: 167) by showing the necessity for egalitarian politics to serve particular peoples and take on board their existing concerns.
Walzer’s work on the Jewish tradition also furnishes useful insights into his conception of politics. The thesis of In God’s Shadow (2012) is that the biblical writers never developed the autonomous political theory that was present in Greece and Rome because God’s authority over the community reduced the scope for human action (Walzer 2012a: xii–xiii, 67–8, 85–8, 93–7, 103–4, 123–5, 183–4). There were entities in biblical Israel that claimed to look after the community: for example, kings, as “the people’s choice” were “servants … of social order,” who could be replaced by the community, as can modern governments (71). Nonetheless, the dominant view, shared by prophets, priests, sages, and messiahs was that God would care for the Israelites if they upheld their part of the covenant. To be in God’s shadow, then, is to deny human responsibility for maintenance of the community. The function of politics is to protect the identities and interests of members by sustaining the community and preventing tyranny (this is implicit in Walzer’s account of “blocked uses of power” in Spheres, 281–4; for discussion, Reiner 2017b: 438–9). Acting politically means leaving God’s shadow by taking on collective responsibility for self-protection.
As Walzer is committed to the view that politics is an inescapable part of both a good life and an egalitarian social order, he concludes that, although ancient Israel “anticipates certain features of democratic culture” by virtue of lay participation and equality under God, it was only an “almost-democracy” (Walzer 2012a: 199–200). So, he praises the post-biblical development of a this-worldly tradition marked by “practical deliberation” and affirming the “principle on which politics necessarily rests: ‘it is not in heaven’ ” (212). This refers to a Talmudic dispute between Rabbis Eliezer and Joshua discussed in Interpretation (Walzer 1987: 30–2) and Chapter 8. In repeating the story, Walzer reaffirms his view that politics is human self-protection within communities containing traditions of meaning, yet wracked by dissensus about the implications of those meanings.