This chapter draws together the strands of the previous chapters in order to show that Walzer has a method of his own that makes an important contribution to the field of political theory. Throughout his corpus, Walzer takes normative principles to follow from meanings in the particular social sphere to which they are to apply. I consider Walzer’s attempts to develop the interpretive method of Spheres into a theory of social criticism in which political theorists develop radical critiques of their society by showing the extent to which social practices diverge from underlying principles to which members of the society are committed (Walzer 1987, 1988a). This shows the interconnection between Walzer’s social democracy and his methodological writing, as the portrait of interpretive theory is drawn from his assessment of the practice of some of the Dissent circle’s intellectual heroes – figures such as George Orwell, Albert Camus, and Ignazio Silone. This account also reconciles the particularism of Spheres with the universalistic appeal to human rights in Wars by invoking a “thin” or “minimal” universal morality that sits alongside, or is nested in, a “thick” or “maximal” moral system unique to a particular society (Walzer 1994a, 1990a). Thus, while the scope of the moral judgments is different in the two theories, that is because of the different practices in question. Walzer’s own verdict is that the argument relating universal to particular morality is his major contribution outside just-war theory.1
Taken together, examination of these developments reveals a more or less coherent method underlying Walzer’s work. I will call this method “critical conventionalism,” because, while it takes conventional meanings as the starting point for theoretical analysis, it does not endorse dominant norms but, rather, subjects them to the test of living up to their own standards. Walzer calls his account “ideological critique” and claims to have developed it from the Marxist tradition, or at least Antonio Gramsci’s reading of it (Walzer 2014b: 225). Walzer’s method makes a major contribution to political theory by advancing a sociological or historical politics where “principles are derived from conventional practices” (Walzer 1980c: 39). It is important to note, though, that it is not our practices that Walzer endorses at all – indeed, he often argues that practices are gravely unjust – but the norms that shape our identities yet are often refracted in oppressive directions by the social powers that be. Walzer’s method allows for radical critique but insists that that be of meaning to its intended beneficiaries.
This approach stands in marked opposition to the ideal theory of much recent work that uses the methods of analytic philosophy. I will go further than Walzer does in suggesting the coherence of his method by showing that both his theory of justice and his just-war theory appeal to critical conventionalism, using existent norms to argue for radical change to current practice.
Walzer’s major statement of interpretive philosophy is Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987), the first two chapters of which were the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 1985. Walzer begins his defense of interpretivism by comparing his approach to two others: “discovery” and “invention” (1–33). He has two major intentions in making this comparison. First, he argues that interpretation “accords best with our everyday experience of morality” (3). Second, he holds that it is possible to base criticism of social power on interpretation (33–66). Taken together, Walzer’s argument aims to “provide a philosophical framework for the understanding of social criticism as a social practice” (vii). In Interpretation’s third chapter, Walzer takes the biblical prophets to be early social critics, analyzing Amos, whom he regards as the most radical prophet (69). Walzer fleshes out his account of social criticism in practice in The Company of Critics (1988), which focuses on eleven twentieth-century critics and defends “connected criticism” against the “oppositional, alienated” model that dominates contemporary understandings. Walzer argues for greater connection between critic and audience and laments the specialization of intellectual life today, revealing his theory’s origins in the broad public-intellectual life of the mid-century.
Discovery is the most traditional philosophical path, but nowadays it is more commonly associated with religious revelation: God reveals the moral law, which is “like a new continent” the “first map” of which is brought to us by religious leaders (Walzer 1987: 4). In contemporary philosophy, Thomas Nagel exemplifies this path because in, The View from Nowhere (1986), he searches for “no particular point of view” (Walzer 1987: 5). Such a viewpoint, if discovered, would provide an objective foundation for morality that transcended the subjectivity of experience and enabled radical critique of received wisdom. Walzer argues, however, that philosophers tend to back away from the “strangeness of their own arguments” and to insist that their principles do not lead to such radical conclusions as it first appears, largely because people will not accept discoveries that are at odds with their existing moral intuitions (7). Consider utilitarianism, which Walzer cites as a seemingly radical discovery. While the principle of utility seems to lead to surprising conclusions, utilitarian philosophers from John-Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick through to Peter Singer have tended to insist on an indirect or rule-based utilitarianism that denies the counter-intuitive conclusions of direct or act-utilitarianism. For example, while Singer’s defense of abortion involves claiming that children under the age of three lack human rights, he has gone to great lengths to insist on the wrongfulness of harming infants (for example, Singer 2011: 123–54). In short, the moral principles philosophers “discover” lack the “critical force” of divine revelation (Walzer 1987: 8). Commenting on Nagel’s “discovery” of the principle that “we should not be indifferent to the suffering of other people,” Walzer quips, “I acknowledge the principle but miss the excitement of revelation. I know that already” (6). Furthermore, discovered philosophies cannot apply to social practice without interpretation.
To understand the path of invention, think of it as discovery for a secular age. This path does not take moral principles to have always existed, waiting for human discovery. Rather, it acknowledges that philosophers create the principles they espouse. Yet it shares with discovery the search for objective truth. The inventor seeks to escape from the existing moral world to design a better one (Walzer 1981: 1–4). In Interpretation, Walzer takes Descartes to be the founder of philosophical invention (Walzer 1987: 9–10), but John Rawls is the most important contemporary exponent, because his theory of justice starts with a “design of a design procedure” (10). In other words, Rawls constructs a methodology appropriate to theorizing about justice so as to secure agreement on distributive principles. In Rawls’s principle, the design procedure invokes the “original position,” whereby Rawls denies to those charged with designing principles of justice for a democratic society any knowledge of the particularities of their social position or identity (Rawls 1971: 17–22, see Chapter 3 above, for fuller discussion). Walzer comments that Rawls intends this to “liberate” the participants to the original position from “the bonds of particularism,” enabling them to produce a rational moral world in which all are prepared to live, regardless of which social position they end up occupying (Walzer 1987: 12). More broadly, the social-contract tradition – from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau through to Nozick (1974) and Scanlon (1998) – follows the path of invention, with the characterization of the state of nature lending legitimacy to the principles that the contract produces.
Invention has gained in popularity as a philosophical mode because it seeks to “create a morality against which we can measure any person’s life, any society’s practices” (Walzer 1987: 13). Walzer argues, however, that invention endangers democratic processes by suggesting that the appropriate grounds for accepting political principles are their philosophical pedigree, not their (temporary) public support (Walzer 1981, 1989/90). Accepting invented principles would override values that society has created by discussion and negotiation or what Walzer calls the “rule of reasons” (Walzer 1983: 304). So, although Walzer believes that Rawls’s argument for his principles of justice may be a valid deduction from his premises, he disputes the validity of the premises, holding that they mistakenly presume that moral principles for people meeting for the first time must be identical to those for communities that share a common life. It is, he says, “as if we were to take a hotel room … as the ideal model of a human home” (Walzer 1987: 14–15). Design procedures are appropriate for construction of new societies, but cannot replace the principles to which existing ones are already committed.
The crucial point is that “neither discovery nor invention is necessary because we already possess what they pretend to provide” (19). The social world provides us with the resources we need to criticize it. In understanding Walzer’s position, it is important to note that he wrote Interpretation to combat the criticisms of Spheres that denied that interpretation could lead to critical egalitarian conclusions (in particular, Dworkin 1983a). Joshua Cohen puts the point starkly, claiming that, “Critical democratic substance and communitarian [i.e. interpretive] method pull in different directions” (Cohen 1986: 458). It is this conclusion that Walzer denies, but he took it seriously – indeed, “to heart” – because he did not intend to be an apologist for our society (Walzer 1988a: ix). So, he insists that interpretation is not “positivist” in its reading of everyday morality (Walzer 1987: 29–30). In other words, every member of the community can develop a different reading of the shared morality. That is why interpretation can be critical: social practices invariably fail to live up to social values. Moreover, there is no alternative to interpretation, because any moral principle that a philosopher invents needs interpretation.
The deep values of the moral world are authoritative for us because they structure our identity as moral beings (21). This is the crucial foundation of Walzerian interpretivism, which is continuous with Spheres’ social-meaning thesis. Interpretivism builds on the Geertzian thesis that the existing world is the source of meaning and value. In the theory of complex equality, it is goods that moral worlds create, which is why we can develop distributive principles only by engagement with the moral world in question. Walzer also argues in Spheres that goods structure the identity of the people who conceive of, create, and come to possess them (Walzer 1983: 8). Moral worlds structure our identity because we cannot exist in the abstract. Nature does not determine our behavior, nor can we find meaning on an individual, idiosyncratic basis, except for our choices within a social system. Walzer thus holds that the fundamental moral question is not, “What is the right thing to do?” but “What is the right thing for us to do?” (Walzer 1987: 22–3). We cannot answer the former question because the issue arises only within particular traditions, and any answer inevitably reflects features of that tradition’s discourse. What such questions revolve around is “ourselves; the meaning of our way of life is at issue” (23). Ways of life are in a perpetual state of flux: social life always changes, so moral answers are always temporary and variable across both space and time. Walzer rejects invention because, like discovery, it tends toward an a-political permanence.
That point is crucial, because Walzer’s interpretivism has frequently been accused of overestimating the degree of social cohesion (for versions of this critique, see Bounds 1994, Roberts 1994, Bader 1995, Orlie 1999, and Erskine 2007). Yet as interpretive conclusions are contestable, those dissatisfied with a particular outcome can always continue to argue. Walzer’s argument is simply that disagreement exists within a tradition that can be interpreted in myriad ways. Later, Walzer was to argue that the “real talk” with which interpretive theory is concerned is more open ended and democratic than the “ideal speech” of inventive philosophy because the former is “unstable and restless” with no “firm conclusions” or “authoritative moments” (Walzer 1989/90: 22). By contrast, invention rules arguments at odds with the design procedure out by fiat, as when Rawls suggests that, on matters of constitutional essentials, arguments from particularity are to be avoided (29; see Rawls 1993).
Invention tends toward a discourse marked by “endless refinement, esoteric jargon, romantic posturing, and fierce intramural polemic” (“State” 1989: 337). For Walzer, this is not really political theory at all, for political approaches affirm the endlessness of argument within a tradition (Reiner 2017a). To illustrate, Walzer refers to the Talmud. Rabbi Eliezer finds himself in a minority of one in a dispute among the sages. Dissatisfied with the majority decision, he calls to heaven for various proofs, all of which are provided. However, Rabbi Joshua insists that, as the dispute is not in heaven, the word of God must give way to majority decision (Walzer 1987: 30–2). Walzer uses the story to illustrate how argument within a tradition occurs: communities contain shared traditions of meaning, yet dispute perpetually the implications for social practice.
The argument for the critical force of interpretation returns to Walzer’s social-democratic routes as a Dissentnik. For the claim that existing values can yield surprising critical insight when reinterpreted was central to Dissent’s foundational project. In the magazine’s early issues, writers repeatedly advanced the claim that the communist left went wrong by recognizing nothing of value in American society, while Cold War liberalism failed to notice the gap between American commitment to freedom and equality and the inequality and unfreedom of American capitalism (Howe 1954, Howe and Coser 1955, Coser 1954, 1958). This is what Howe meant when he argued that socialists must attack failures to live up to the USA’s “myth” of democracy but not the myth itself (“Discussion” 1976: 70). In Interpretation, Walzer combines this argument with the social-meaning thesis and generalizes it to social criticism per se.
Crucial to the force of interpretation is that connection breeds interest in a particular community that universalist criticism such as the path of invention can never sustain: “Amos is a critic not only because of his anger but also because of his concern” (Walzer 1987: 90). Walzer therefore calls for connected criticism, which subjects its own society to sustained critique on the grounds that it fails to live up to its “myth” with reference to values enshrined in the myth itself. A social critic “exposes the false appearances of society” and “gives expression to [our] deepest sense of how [we] ought to live” (Walzer 1988a: 232). As a result, Walzer holds, interpretive method pulls in the same direction as critical substance. That is, any society has its own idealist image of itself. The USA, for example, is the land of the free. However, each society fails to live up to that image – as with the rates of mass incarceration in the USA. The gap between ideal and reality is the source of critical insight.
We must note two crucial points. First, critics need some distance, not from their society, but from political power within it. Walzer argues that the ideal critic is “in but not wholly of their society,” because marginality motivates criticism (Walzer 1987: 37). As we will see, this is his assessment of the critical power of such figures as Orwell, Breytenbach, and Camus. Radical detachment is neither necessary nor desirable: it provides an insufficient foundation for complaining about this injustice in that place on the grounds of our principles. A degree of marginality is, however, useful. To illustrate, Walzer deploys the analogy of age:
Age and youth both make for critical distance … But the principles of the old and the young are not distant, and they are certainly not objective … What makes criticism possible, or relatively easy … is a certain quality of not being involved … both groups stand a little to the side. They are, or they can be, kibitzers. A little to the side, but not outside: critical distance is measured in inches.
(60–1)
What makes for social criticism, we might say, is marginalized attachment.2
Second, Walzer’s theory modifies the particularism of Spheres, pointing toward a structural universalism in which, even though the moral content of different societies varies, the sort of practice that goes on when constructing a moral world is similar (46). Walzer later called this position “reiterative universalism” (Walzer 1990a: 183–99). One of the things that is reiterated is the fact of inequality. Walzer follows Marx and Gramsci in holding that “every ruling class is compelled to present itself as a universal class” (Walzer 1987: 40). Walzer acknowledges that social construction always contains elements of coercion (Walzer 1993a: 40–1, Reiner 2016: 372). All societies contain dominant groups, but they are rarely so dominant that they can rule by force alone. This makes social construction a mixed process, in which ruling classes must offer apologies for their domination, attempting to portray their class interests as general ones. This is a way of borrowing from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (on which, see Walzer 2018: 77–97), in which the values of the ruling class become the common sense of society. Walzer argues that this “gives hostage to future social critics. It sets standards that the rulers … cannot live up to, given their particularist ambitions” (Walzer 1987: 41). Social criticism works by pointing to hypocrisy and showing where practice fails to live up to principle. Critics exploit social meanings that “are more mocked than mirrored in everyday experience” (43). As a result, there are internal resources for criticism in every society. The task of social critics is to utilize those resources to combat domination.
To illustrate how social criticism works, Walzer assesses the practice of recent critics in The Company of Critics (1988), a political companion to Interpretation. A curious feature of Company is that Walzer intends to defend connected criticism yet most of the critics he considers viewed themselves as alienated. Walzer starts with a chapter on Julien Benda, who “provides a classic defense of the old idea of intellectual detachment and critical solitude” (26), and is markedly critical of major figures such as Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse for failing either to “inhabit” a social setting or to “construct” a new one (191, 170–90, Walzer 1987: 56–60 makes similar criticisms of Marx and Sartre). The book therefore looks odd: Walzer says that he is writing about the practice of social criticism, yet his critics frequently do not theorize as social critics (see Barry 1990 for extended critique on these lines; see also Agnafors 2010: 105). This is because Walzer’s task is to enter into conversation with critics about how to undertake the enterprise so as to draw a portrait of a good social critic and defend Walzer’s own work as a form of social criticism.
Walzer argued in Interpretation that the biblical prophets were the “inventors of the practice of social criticism” (Walzer 1987: 71). Yet at the start of Company, he suggests that, “Social criticism must be as old as society itself” (Walzer 1988a: 3). Given this universalism and the abstraction of attempting to portray the general qualities needed by critics, it may seem as though the account of social criticism has become unmoored from the particularism of Spheres and Interpretation. It is indeed worth noting that Walzerian social criticism depends upon “democratic” assumptions that social engagement is preferable to “hermetic” isolation (Walzer 1988a: 12) and so may occur only in societies committed in some sense to the notion of a common good. In fact, however, Walzer situates all members of the company – including those who sought detachment – in the context of particular twentieth-century struggles. These range from post-war American (Marcuse) and French (Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir) intellectual life through fascist Italy (Antonio Gramsci and Ignazio Silone) and war-torn Spain (George Orwell) to post-war Israel (Martin Buber) and apartheid South Africa (Breyten Breytenbach, the sole member of the company still living when Walzer wrote Company). In Company, too, good criticism must be situated if it is to find an audience.
Walzer’s chapter on Orwell exemplifies his approach. Orwell had long been an inspiration to the Dissent circle because he combined the anti-communism of Animal Farm and 1984 with the commitment to decrying the working conditions typical of capitalism shown in The Road to Wigan Pier and parts of Homage to Catalonia. For Walzer’s mentor, Irving Howe, Orwell was both inspirational and, of particular import, crucial to Howe’s political vision after he abandoned the Trotskyism of his youth (for discussion, see Rodden 2005: 5–16, Sorin 2002 is also useful). Walzer follows this legacy in praising Orwell for being “faithful to what he was” and rejecting the “simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong” (Walzer 1988a: 121). Commenting on this, Walzer notes that the upper-middle-class guilt that underlies the theory is an unhelpful political compass, insisting instead on a left politics that emerges out of the life experiences of workers and values that are often common to the society as a whole. Walzer takes from Orwell the idea that it is “never a good idea for the left to set itself in stark opposition to the values of ordinary people” (123), and so reviews with sympathy Orwell’s ambivalence toward the attachment to consumer goods of much of English society. While critics might view Orwell’s resulting position “socialism with a bourgeois face,” Walzer insists that it be understood as “socialism with an English face,” as attachment to particular things is of a piece with attachment to places and culture (125–6). Radical socialist reform or revolution requires “the mobilization of the people,” which can happen only “by appealing to their sentiments and values,” which are “historically formed [and] culturally specific,” (126) and that include deep commitment to both freedom and equality. Walzer concludes that Orwell was right to believe that he could combine adherence to some of Britain’s deepest values with commitment to democratic revolutionary change (132). What makes Orwell a crucial source of inspiration to both Walzer and, before him, Howe is that he sought to model an egalitarian British society on the deep values of the hierarchical Britain of his day and thus laid the foundation for their attempts to do something similar in what might seem to be the even less fertile soil of American values. This reiterates Walzer’s view that social democracy must combine equality and pluralism, with the latter making it the democracy of a particular society.
The critic with whom Walzer most strongly identifies is probably Albert Camus (136–52). Walzer particularly admires Camus’s commitment to his community, the pied-noirs – people of French ethnicity born in Algeria while it was a French colony. This position led Camus to receive sharp criticism from Sartre and De Beauvoir for failing to denounce French brutality during the last phase of the Algerian struggle against French colonialism in the late 1950s. Walzer defends Camus against the criticism that he betrayed his principles during the Algerian war for independence because he failed to “come to grips with the brutality of colonialism” (136–7). This account has proven highly controversial, as Walzer’s defense of Camus is obviously inspired by his own defense of Israel against criticisms of it as a settler-colonialist society (Said notes this in his review of Exodus, Said 1986). Walzer’s defense of Camus thus serves as an important test case of the possibility of combining connection with criticism.
Camus had long been an inspiration to Walzer: in “Political Action” (1973), it was Camus’s play The Just Assassins that underlay Walzer’s preferred response to actors with dirty hands (Walzer 1973b: 291–3). In Company, Walzer praises Camus’s refusal to reject French Algeria, arguing that social criticism of colonialism is more likely than abstract anti-colonialism to know how to balance drawing a line by saying “no” to particular actions with the colonial society’s right to (post-colonial) existence (Walzer 1988a: 139). Critics such as Sartre and De Beauvoir aligned themselves unambiguously with the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN) and saw their task as continuous criticism of the French government (139–42). Like Said, they believed that the task of critics is to take their stand with the oppressed (Said 1986: 100–2; for discussion, Hart 2000: 176–86). Walzer objects on both prudential and moral grounds, holding that critics who break ties with their fellows will never be listened to and that unambiguous commitment leads to an “ideologically flattened” worldview in which hard-won impartiality slides into “cold indifference” (Walzer 1988a: 142). Such critics seem not to care about the fate of the colonizers after decolonization and are unconcerned by terrorist modes of resistance.
By contrast, Walzer argues, because Camus worked from principles “naturalized in his own society,” he was able to apply those principles “with a stringency [that] made his fellow citizens uncomfortable” (143). Camus argued for redistribution of land, local self-government, and equal rights, and decried the colonial regime for its indifference to Berber suffering. This is, Walzer claims, what social critics do: “lift the veil, expose the actual experience of oppression; the remaining work is done … by the mores” (143). Camus showed the pied-noirs that their own moral commitments should force them to abandon colonial domination. However, Camus could not commit to Algerian independence with the same alacrity as he had supported Tunisian and Moroccan independence, because Algeria contained so many Europeans that it essentially consisted of two separate nations. Camus believed that an independent Algeria led by the FLN would mean the destruction of the pied-noirs (144–5). Camus insisted upon the “mutual acceptance, not the abolition” of each country’s aspirations and held that justice required a negotiated settlement involving co-existence and redistribution of land and wealth (146–7).
Commenting on this, Walzer makes a general claim that goes to the heart of his worldview, and that reiterates his agreement with Orwell’s rejection of the “simple” theory of oppression discussed above. Walzer notes that people “don’t lose their rights even if they are ‘historically in the wrong’ ” (145). Here he puts the point differently to Camus, who famously said that he would defend his mother before justice. Walzer insists that “justice must include one’s own people, though not necessarily on their own terms” (147). Walzer plainly has in mind that Palestinian statehood must not come at the price of Israel’s security, and that, although Israel is at fault for having maintained settlements on Palestinian territory for decades, putting right that wrong should not involve denying Israel’s right to exist as an independent state.3 Critics of Walzer have often responded to his commitment to particular communities that the existence of individual members of the community does indeed matter, but not the survival of the community itself (Said 1986, Shue 2004, Rule 2012). One can, that is, condemn a colonial power without endorsing collective guilt that involves individual punishment of ordinary members of that power. Yet for Walzer such a view cannot be right, for both political and theoretical reasons. In Company, he emphasizes the former, noting that “easy fault-finding is never very effective” because it “doesn’t touch the conscience of the people to whom it is addressed” (Walzer 1988a: 151). That is to say, given pied-noirs and Israeli commitment to communal survival, their endorsement of criticism of their state’s oppressive behavior depends on recognition that a positive solution will involve continued collective existence, albeit without the continuation of oppression. Walzer insists that a complex moral view find space for the reform, not the destruction, of oppressive communities (Walzer 2015b, 2018).
Theoretically, we should remember that the social-meaning thesis underlies social criticism: if meaning is a local product, destruction of the community robs members of the ability to continue refining and renegotiating meaning. If we are committed to the rights of individual members of guilty communities, we should insist on reforming those communities, without denying the commitment to a reformed version of the community as a crucial source of identity for individual constituents. Walzer’s case is that social critics can prompt reform by showing citizens a mirror. This is why he uses the example of Hamlet showing Gertrude a mirror. She sees “simultaneously what she (really) is, and what she most deeply wishes to be” (Walzer 1988a: 151). Similarly, social critics can prompt the cessation of oppression by appealing to the conscience of their fellows. Walzer’s response to Dworkin’s critique of Spheres, then, is that justice is both our mirror and our critic, implying that it takes either great self-confidence or blithe lack of self-awareness to look in a mirror and be completely satisfied with the image therein.
As well as accusing Walzer’s interpretivism of lacking the resources necessary for radical critique, philosophers also held that the social-meaning thesis exaggerated moral differences between societies. To many, it appeared to embrace a relativism that abandoned the “chief goal of traditional political philosophy” by eschewing the possibility of criticism of an entire society on behalf of a universal moral code (for versions of this claim, see Galston 1989: 122, Raz 1991, Carens 2004, Kateb 2014, Scanlon 2014; cf. Walzer 2013a; for discussion, Reiner 2016, 2017a). I argued in Chapter 3 that one of Walzer’s great contributions is to challenge that traditional goal. However, a problem remained insofar as Walzer’s just-war theory rests on universal rights to life and liberty, rendering his two major bodies of work seemingly incompatible. To reconcile the two, Walzer developed the argument that there is a minimal universal moral code that prohibits attacks on the person but is always embedded in a particular maximal system of morality (Walzer 1994a). Thus, there are resources in every moral system that just-war theory can draw on; however, substantive theories of distributive justice are only part of each maximal system (21–40). Put differently, there is a “common, garden variety” sense of justice that renders appeals to basic rights understandable and applicable across the world, but the idea of justice always also contains a sense specific to particular places (2–3). Everyone agrees with the prophet Isaiah that it is unjust to “grind the faces of the poor,” but what counts as grinding their faces is culturally particular (4–5). That is why there is both a thick and a thin morality.
Walzer’s argument again has its origins in his work for Dissent. By the time that he made it in the early 1990s, he had been co-editor of the magazine with Irving Howe for nearly two decades. After Howe’s death in 1993, Walzer and new co-editor Mitchell Cohen, then professor of political science at Baruch College, assumed greater responsibility for what had, really, been Howe’s show. Like Walzer, a key theme in Cohen’s thought has been his attempt to balance commitment to particular places with humanism. In 1992, he dubbed this balance “rooted cosmopolitanism” (Cohen 1992), as he and Walzer engaged in repeated argument in Dissent with more individualistic and anti-nationalist contributors (“Nationalism” 1996, Bromwich 1995). In attempting to balance universal and particular values, Walzer and Cohen continued Dissent’s long tradition of incorporating a range of values ordinarily taken to be conflictual and even incompatible into an “overlapping dissensus” (Reiner 2013). In attempting to reconcile universal and particular, Walzer thus reaffirms his commitment to value pluralism4 and to treating left politics as operating within a shared tradition marked by family disagreement (see especially 1998a).
Walzer’s first version of the argument distinguishes between two types of universalism. He calls the familiar type, which he criticizes, “covering-law universalism” (Walzer 1990a: 184). It takes the view that there is one correct path of historical development. Those communities that do not follow it are “chronicles of ignorance and meaningless strife” (185). In recent social science, something like this position can be seen in modernization theory’s claims that all countries are at different stages on route to a supposedly similar modernity (see Walzer’s critique at 1980b: 189–200). Walzer’s main target is the analytic approach to political theory that he criticized in Interpretation as the path of invention. Like Cohen, Walzer defends a different, qualified universalism rooted in particular understandings that “helps to explain the appeal of moral particularism” and that Walzer calls “reiterative universalism” (Walzer 1990a: 186). On this account, each people achieves its own version of collective self-determination. The best way to understand Walzer’s distinction is to say that while covering-law universalism gives morality a universal content, reiterative universalism sees a recurrent structure filled in with radically different content. Crucial to Walzer’s universalism is the idea of reiteration (on which see also Walzer 1990b, on recurrence of communitarian critiques of liberalism, discussed in Chapter 4 above), because this avoids the stipulative accounts of morality of which he has always been critical, and leaves room for collective action instead. So, reiterative universalism both mandates pluralism and remains a type of universal position, because it imposes a moral injunction to recognize otherness (Walzer 1990a: 195). Even when reiteration results in different outcomes, the process of social construction is mutually recognizable because each group makes a moral world in response to experiences of power (196). This is why Walzer emphasizes in “Objectivity and Social Meaning” (1993) that social construction is always a mixed process involving both force and fraud, which means that saying each community must find its own way does not mean that they should do as they see fit (Walzer 1993a). It is possible to instantiate a moral world inadequately, opening room for criticism on the grounds of “failure of practical outcomes to match conceptual ones: performances falling short of promises” (Walzer 1990a: 198).
The notion of reiterative universalism, then, uncovers links between different aspects of Walzer’s work, and shows how one can defend a situated universalism that respects people’s lived experiences. It is because morality is reiteratively made again and again that no covering law can apply. A moral world is something that we make and do, although the process remains “mysterious” (Walzer 1993a: 41). On the other hand, because social construction structures our identity, a version of the normative system is binding on us. Walzer concludes that morality is “objectively relative” or “objectively right relative to the prevailing meanings” (44). The crux of this claim is not that any one version of social meanings may legitimately be imposed, but rather that it is impossible to criticize a set of understandings as a whole, because doing so would presuppose a right set of meanings, and the fact that meanings are cultural negates this possibility. There is, Walzer holds, no universal path that social construction must take (45–6), so when meanings change over time, it does not follow that the old way of life was a mistake: the appropriate arrangements may have followed from the relevant meanings.
Walzer’s insistence that the process of meaning creation is mixed and mysterious has provoked constant criticism. Critics have questioned why reiterative values should be authoritative if they are the product of a “manipulative, exploitative and blood-soaked sequence of historical events” (Orend 2000: 21, Warnke 1993). Walzer responds that because there is no covering-law morality, sets of meanings have “objective value” even for dissenters (Walzer 1993a: 42), since it is “only by virtue of [the set of meanings’] existence that [people] exist as the moral beings [they] are” (Walzer 1987: 21). We do indeed reject particular meanings but cannot but live within a set of social constructions, for it completes our identity by making us who we are (Walzer 1993a: 42, 2004a: 1–20).
However, this account does not make clear how Walzer can, in his just-war theory, appeal to human rights. The recognition that social construction occurs in response to power makes room for recognition of the universality of oppression, but rights-protection requires a form of universal prohibition that seems to limit the reiteration of a common life by recognizing the claims of individuals whether their community does so or not. The notion that, because social construction is “conceptual in character” and so “never more than partially instantiated” (Walzer 1993a: 46), it is universally possible to criticize the moral world internally and reinterpret the implications of social meanings will only get us so far here. Rights are a form of political guarantee that certain forms of treatment are forbidden. As discussed in Chapter 4, one of Walzer’s major criticisms of liberal theory, particularly in the mode of analytic philosophy, is its search for guarantees, which undermines the inevitable uncertainty of political life. It may always be possible to keep arguing about what a set of meanings implies, but given Walzer’s political indeterminacy and majoritarianism, it is not possible to ensure that the right really is protected.
Explaining how reiterative universalism can allow for human rights is the task of Thick and Thin (1994), in which Walzer’s invocation of thin, minimal universalism allows for some guaranteed prohibitions but does not undercut the particularism of much moral life. This is because the notion that justice has a garden-variety universal meaning suggests that human rights are mutually comprehensible. The fact that, say, the My Lai massacre harmed its citizens could be understood by all, because all cultures have norms against indiscriminate murder (on My Lai, see Walzer 2015a: 309–16). However, if we can distribute social goods justly only if we know what the goods in question mean to the people to whom they are distributed, and if goods are collective cultural products that lack natural meanings that might apply everywhere, then it follows that only in a thick, maximalist morality can we understand goods and reason about distributive justice. Walzer suggests that moral reflection is intimately linked to other social norms, only some of which are familiar to those from other cultures (Walzer 1994a: 5–6). Minimalism cannot be a foundation for thicker, covering-law universalism because it is “reiteratively particularist and locally significant, intimately bound up with the maximal moralities” (7). It is not that social construction can produce universal moral principles but that moral discourse is something that people everywhere continually engage in.
Put differently, Walzer suggests that, as part of human society, morality has a necessarily dual aspect: “universal because it is human, particular because it is a society” (8). Covering-law universalism would make “the adjective dominant over the noun,” because societies share collective experiences but humanity does not (8). This reiterates the claim that goods are social. Walzer repeats that, while it is “human to have [goods], there is no singular way of having them” (8). This argument does modify the social-meaning thesis somewhat. In Spheres, Walzer took all meaning to be social and so held that even food is a social good susceptible of myriad meanings (Walzer 1983: 8). When in Thick and Thin he gives the human element some independent force, he modifies the depth of his cultural pluralism. However, even in Spheres, he had accepted that, during food shortages, it is possible to prioritize the meaning of food as that which sustains life (8). This is important for understanding Walzer’s argument because it suggests that objects may have a minimal universal meaning that is not social and that applies to those things necessary for the immediate continuation of human life. There is room for universal meanings where life is at stake, so just-war theory, which deals with mortal threats to the human body, can proceed with reference to universal morality.
However, Walzer insists, minimal morality is always embedded in particular idiom. Even Walzer’s support for cultural pluralism comes from contemporary liberalism, a maximal morality (Walzer 1994a: 17), perhaps with a dose of cultural anthropology thrown in. So, attempts to criticize other societies quickly pass into the confines of a particular morality. This means that such criticism should be coercive, rather than persuasive, only in exceptional circumstances (15–16, reiterating the minimalist view of humanitarian intervention defended in Walzer 2015a: 86–108 and Walzer 1980a, discussed in Chapter 1). For the most part, it is better for critics to be social ones who go to work inside particular maximal moralities (Walzer 1994a: 33–9).
An implication of this account is that Walzer’s commitment to collective self-determination cannot require democracy itself. Rather, Walzer calls his position “democratic idealism” (58). Democratic idealism insists upon collective self-governance because each community creates its standards of value that ought to be authoritative for it. Yet the meaning of self-government is culturally specific, so the right to self-determination includes the right to define collectively the terms of political association, once minimal rights are secured. It follows that “democracy in China will have to be Chinese” (60–1). Walzer argues that this is necessary if we are to do justice to people’s understanding of themselves as individuals. For example, in “Objectivity,” he considers a hypothetical society in which women have been constructed as “objects of exchange” (Walzer 1993a: 47; see also 1983: 313–15, on the Indian caste system) and asks how we should consider the exchange of women between patriarchal households that follows. Walzer starts by insisting that if women in such a society do not consent, the transactions are of course unjust because “[c]onstructions of persons are not free … The theory of social construction implies (some sort of) human agency and requires the recognition of women” as agents (Walzer 1993a: 47–8).
But what if women do view themselves as objects of exchange? Walzer’s first response is that the question illustrates the limits of hypothetical examples: “if the experience of being treated as an object of exchange is the sort of experience we think it is … what reasons would [women] have for agreeing? If … the experience does not match our understanding of it … what is the philosophical issue” (48)? In other words, while women in such a society might have good reasons to hide their opposition, it is hard to imagine them really acknowledging the social meaning, which renders the objection moot. Nonetheless, Walzer answers the question about how to respond to a society in which women think of themselves as objects of exchange, not because they have been brainwashed or coerced but because the practice of exchange is “one part of a larger pattern of relationship, fitted to a system of beliefs” that women accept (48–9). He insists that in such a case, respect for women’s agency requires accepting their self-description (49–50). Such women would not be objects, for their status as such reflects their subjectivity (49), but Walzer sees “no morally acceptable way of denying the woman-who-is-an-object-of-exchange her own reasons and her own place in a valued way of life” (49). Outsiders may attempt to persuade her to reject such status, but they wrong her if they act coercively, because “she has to choose what she thinks are the better reasons” (49). If the set of social meanings convinces her that object status is best for her, that status must be respected, for those meanings construct her sense of self.
Here, the fault-lines between Walzer’s position and thicker universalisms become clear. For Walzer argues that not only are we not now but we never will be “members of a single universal tribe. The crucial commonality of the human race is particularism: we participate, all of us, in thick cultures that are our own” (Walzer 1994a: 83; compare to Walzer 1983: 314, which calls us “culture-producing creatures”). Walzer’s insistence on the permanence of cultural identity has embroiled him in numerous heated debates, most importantly with Dworkin and Nagel at a symposium in honor of Isaiah Berlin after Berlin’s death (see account in Dworkin, Lilla, and Silvers 2001: 169–76, 190–8). Walzer’s opponents argue against the view that communal attachment is part of an “irrevocable human nature” (193). Given Walzer’s insistence, borrowed from Clifford Geertz, on the plasticity of human nature (Geertz 1973: 45–50), this puts the point in terms that target one of Walzer’s central commitments. That is, critics charge that if human nature is variable, we cannot know that all human beings are attached to their community. However, Walzer’s response must be that it is not that we are attached to community so much as that we are formed by it precisely because nature does not fully form us and so we must find some source of meanings outside ourselves. This is, I think, what Walzer means when he says that socialists advocate community for the sake of knowledge, not intimacy (Walzer 1980b: 12–13): that community matters because without it we cannot understand ourselves and our place in the world, not because we must maintain adherence to any particular values.
The critics’ claim is more often that commitment to different communities is incompatible with equality. For example, James Rule objects to Walzer’s “tribalism,” because it “so often seeks to uphold the specialness of those on the inside,” and treats outsiders as the “wrong kind of people” (Rule 1992: 520–2). Rule echoes Said’s claim that Walzer’s position is really a defense of Israel and that Israel’s existence depends on denying political equality to Palestinians. On this view, reiterative universalism is not a genuine universalism because it cannot ensure sufficient universal protections. It may protect against attacks on the person, but cannot ensure that people are treated as equal citizens regardless of their identity. This position, in short, is a version of the cosmopolitanism that we discussed in Chapter 6 that seeks to extend liberal rights across the globe.
On Walzer’s account, it is the search for such extensive guarantees that is the problem, for this quest has insufficient respect for political pluralism and possibility. Walzer suggests that his critics think that there is only one type of just polity, normally modeled closely on the contemporary USA, and insists that nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of social meanings.5 Because we develop our identities in communities, we have a right to continue to live in them if we choose, so long as we respect minority rights. As a result, the guarantees that Rule and Dworkin desire must be worked out within political communities, not across them, and are the task of the citizen body, not of intellectuals. We might go further and argue that insisting that people be treated as equals may fail to do justice to their conceptions of themselves and so not feel like equality to them, another reason why Walzer’s egalitarianism takes its starting point from cultural meanings.
Walzer intends his portrait of the practice of social criticism as a defense of his own work. Yet I think we can go further than he does in using the account to illustrate his methodological contribution. Not only are Walzer’s just-war theory and his argument for complex equality compatible with each other, but they both use the method of critical conventionalism. Just-war theory argues for (minimal) universal moral principles, and complex equality for (thick) culturally particular sphere specificity, but both appeal to the existing moral world as the basis of their argument. Like a social critic, Walzer-the-just-war-theorist seeks to “expose the hypocrisy of soldiers and statesmen who publicly acknowledge [the moral reality of war] while seeking in fact only their own advantage” (Walzer 2015a: xxiii). By contrast, Walzer seeks to explicate the principles developed over millennia of war. In both cases, Walzer presumes that the meanings to which theorists should appeal are those that human beings have already created. The war convention is something that Walzer uncovers by the same sort of anthropological and historical investigation he uses in Spheres, albeit on a global scale. Moreover, he criticizes those political theorists who use the methods of analytic philosophy, treating political theory as an enterprise in deducing ethical principles from rational premises, in similar ways. In both cases, he argues that they downplay the value that existing practices have to their participants and so misunderstand the spheres of social life in question (Walzer 2007: 304).
The methodology of Walzer’s work, then, is roughly consistent. Throughout his career, he inquires into particular areas of social life, insisting that normative arguments refer to the moral meanings uncovered by that inquiry. Furthermore, the thesis underlying the work is similar: that meaning cannot be deduced from a natural order, because any meaning that exists for groups of human beings is something that they continually create and recreate. That is why his just-war theory would not apply to residents of some other world. Walzer distinguishes his view from the abstraction of analytic philosophy, which tends to reiterate the “traditional philosophical dislike for politics” (Walzer 1980a: 234, 1981). Engaging with the world so as to test our moral perceptions is thus the central precept of Walzer’s general approach to political theory. This means that his work draws political theory away from philosophy, and toward the narrative disciplines of some of the social sciences and humanities. I return to this point in the conclusion.
What this suggests is that Walzer’s work is a sort of social criticism of dominant modes of political theory. Walzer is of course a political theorist; however, he is one who more often disagrees with the approach of his peers than he takes it up, and who consequently comes to different conclusions. Although he learned “to ‘do’ political philosophy” when he attended the School for Ethical and Legal Philosophy in the late 1960s, he “quickly got impatient with the playful extension of hypothetical cases, moving farther and farther away from the world we all lived in” (Walzer 2007: 307–8). Walzer’s frustration never caused him to abandon political theory, but it gave him the benefit of marginalized attachment. He has spent a career engaged in debate and argument with analytic theorists, seeking the critical distance of just a few inches. In doing so, he has modeled an alternative type of theory that addresses the normative political problems of concern to the field but that proceeds with reference to and in dialogue with the world that will, ultimately, determine (temporary) resolutions to policy issues.
Consider the underlying themes that have structured many of the debates between Walzer and his critics we have considered. On humanitarian intervention, the moral equality of soldiers, supreme emergency, complex equality, interpretation, multiculturalism, and global justice, Walzer has argued that, because meanings and identities are social, we must leave room for a common life. In each case, his critics have suggested that this undermines notions of individual freedom, human rights, and equality. For example, Jeff McMahan’s claim that the war convention is the wrong foundation for just-war theory because it is insufficiently compatible with liberal-democratic principle echoes Ronald Dworkin’s critique that egalitarian distributive justice cannot appeal to social meanings. Each rejects the claim that it is possible to combine conventionalism with criticism. Yet it is not true that Walzer’s work is uncritical of existing norms. It would indeed be an odd political theory that took the existing body of norms as definitive. If that were what Walzer did, his work would simply be a sociological survey of the laws of war and common attitudes to justice, not a set of moral arguments. In fact, Walzer’s method does not commit him to uphold every aspect of existing conventions and his practice does not do that. Walzer does not argue that whatever the most popular opinion is must be followed but that normative conclusions ought to follow from social meanings.
In many of these debates, Walzer takes the position that ultimate decision-making power must be left to the body politic to decide in accordance with its common life, and so rejects attempts to determine normative principles too finely. Critics regard this as incompatible with liberalism’s appeal to human beings as the ultimate unit of value, and as undermining human rights. However, Walzer’s commitment to social democracy should not obscure the fact that his position is firmly within the broad family of liberalisms. As a liberal socialist, he stands in a distinguished tradition that even the later John Rawls did not repudiate (Rawls 2002: 138–9). As a pluralist, he draws heavily on some of the work of Isaiah Berlin (see Walzer’s contribution in Dworkin, Lilla, and Silvers 2001). Walzer’s work suggests that academic political theory must make room for a variety of liberalisms. As a form of social liberalism, Walzer’s position is well equipped to engage in social criticism of analytic liberalism because it shares many family resemblances and can disagree within a tradition. This makes Walzer particularly well equipped to make major contributions to the field, uncovering alternative implications of moral commitments shared between him and liberal political theorists. For example, for all the criticisms of Spheres, many accept the idea that distributive principles should be meaning-dependent, differing across spheres of social life (Barry 1984: 815, Scanlon 2014, Sandel 2014). This makes Walzer’s theory an important contribution to the post-Rawlsian debate, shifting the attention of analytic political theory toward pluralism.