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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Political Thought and Political Action: Michael Walzer's Engagement with American Radicalism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4x10110b Author Reiner, Jason Toby David Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Political Thought and Political Action: Michael Walzer’s Engagement with American Radicalism By Jason Toby David Reiner A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mark Bevir, Chair Professor Shannon Stimson Professor Sarah Song Professor David Hollinger Spring 2011 Abstract Political Thought and Political Action: Michael Walzer’s Engagement with American Radicalism by Jason Toby David Reiner Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Mark Bevir, Chair This dissertation provides an account of the historical development of the political thought of Michael Walzer from the 1950s to the present day. It situates Walzer within an American tradition of social democratic thought and argues that only when he is so situated can his thought be understood fully. Walzer’s engagement with that tradition, most notably through his work on Dissent magazine, has structured how he has responded to many of the major developments in political life over the course of his career, including the decline of movement politics, the rise of neoliberalism, the recent waves of immigration to the USA, and the increased salience of civil society following the demise of the Soviet Union. Understanding Walzer in this way recovers the egalitarian aspirations of his theory, which are lost in those academic accounts that are inspired by analytic philosophy. Particularly in the analysis of liberal political theorists, Walzer’s commitment to interpreting the shared understandings of the communities of which he is a part is seen as sitting uncomfortably with his social democracy. The dissertation argues that when Walzer’s conception of equality is taken seriously, the path of interpretation is closely allied to it. If we wish to instantiate equality in political practice, rather than refining the philosophical concept ever more closely, we have no choice but to take seriously the interests, desires, and passions of citizens and of citizen-activists. That is why his conception of equality, which is more sociologically robust than the dominant liberal alternative, has more chance of being appropriated by radical movements. In the dissertation, consideration is also given to Walzer’s just war theory, to the impact of his Judaism on his thought, and to the relationship between these things and his continued adherence to a version of democratic socialism. 1 Contents CHAPTER PAGE NUMBER Introduction 1 1. The Early Writings of Michael Walzer 15 (1955-1970) 2. The 1970s 32 3. Arrival At the Institute (1980-1985) 77 4. The Essayist as Public Intellectual 112 (1986-1992) 5. Cultural Encounters and Moral 156 Judgments (1993-2000) 6. Revisions and Summations (2001-2011) 176 Conclusion 197 References and Notes 205 Bibliography 269 i Introduction: The Point of Studying the Political Thought of Michael Walzer (and the point of doing so historically) I A just society is one in which goods are distributed in accordance with reasons intrinsic to the meaning of the good in question and in which pre-eminence in one sphere of social life does not bring advantages outside that sphere.1 A just war is one fought in defense of national sovereignty and in which non-combatant immunity is respected and the laws of war obeyed in all situations save that of the ‘supreme emergency,’ when national survival is at stake.2 The appropriate task of the political theorist is to act as a social critic who interprets the shared understandings of particular communities rather than claiming to discover or invent moral principles de novo.3 These are among the arguments that have made Michael Walzer one of the most prominent of contemporary political and international relations theorists. He has made contributions to the debates about the ethics of war, distributive justice, civil society, multiculturalism, the Jewish political tradition, radical politics in contexts as disparate as late twentieth century America, seventeenth century England, and Biblical Israel, global governance, and more. Walzer is also one of the USA’s foremost public intellectuals. In recognition of this, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines voted him the 68th most prominent public intellectual in the world in 2005 and the 61st most prominent in 2008.4 Walzer’s fame in this regard stems from his editorship of Dissent, a New York magazine of left intellectuals for which Walzer has worked in some capacity since 1955, when he was 20 years old, his frequent contributions to the New Republic, for which he is a contributing editor, and his stance on such public debates as those surrounding the American wars with Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and the Middle Eastern conflict. The literature is crying out for a study of Walzer’s political thought that focuses on the various aspects of his career: one that seeks to provide an interpretation of the main body of his work and to situate that work within the context of the American left as Walzer has been part of it. My thesis is just such a study and is the first book-length study of Walzer’s work as a whole that relates his political theory to his political commentary and status as a public intellectual and to his involvement with a section of the American left. There are many extant studies of Walzer that provide useful examinations of the philosophical status of broad swathes of his work: notably, Brian Orend provides an important analysis of Walzer’s just war theory and relates it to the substantive theory of justice advanced in Spheres of Justice, and Georgia Warnke has undertaken a sustained critique of Walzer’s interpretivist methodology.5 David Miller, one of Walzer’s most regular interlocutors, has published both a collection of essays on Spheres and a collection of Walzer’s essays, to each of which he adds an introduction interpreting Walzer’s arguments and career development.6 The importance of my thesis is that it is more comprehensive and more historical than previous studies of Walzer’s work. My thesis thus speaks to several audiences. First, it engages with those interested in the status of public intellectuals in the USA over the second half of the twentieth century and with the argument about whether the role has gone into decline owing to professionalization and institutionalization.7 I have said that Walzer is a public intellectual; however, he has been a university professor throughout his career, something that may be odds with that account. In this 1 thesis, I grapple with the question of Walzer’s political commentary and ask what it means to be a public intellectual and an academic simultaneously. Secondly, it concerns the status of left-wing political activism in the United States over the same time period and engages with theorists of American democracy. In particular, I highlight Walzer as having worked on projects and developed arguments that were partly inspired by dilemmas common to the American left. In this regard, of particular importance is the way in which Walzer responded to the rise and decline of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s and to the electoral success of neoliberalism and Reaganomics from the late 1970s onwards. Thus, my account of Walzer recovers the political nature of his thought, which is lost in more analytical accounts. I consider carefully Walzer’s involvement with the group known as the ‘New York Intellectuals’ (NYIs) and in particular with the founders of Dissent, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. I take Walzer’s work to emerge in large part a prolonged, but perpetually tense, engagement with the American tradition of ‘radical democracy’,8 in his attempt to transform American politics in an egalitarian direction while remaining loyal to the fundamental tenets of American liberalism.9 Thirdly, the thesis engages with an approach to intellectual history that sees our thought as emerging out of various traditions, where a tradition means an ongoing argument, and developments in our thought as emerging out of dilemmas, in other words with forms of historicism. I argue that the historicist methodology helps us to interpret Walzer’s work more clearly than does the method of analysis favored by many political theorists because it situates it in context. This point demonstrates the relationship between the arguments, for I take Walzer to face dilemmas common to the American left in the last 50 years. The central dilemma is how to transcend both liberalism and Marxism (and other varieties of revolutionary socialism) while drawing on both traditions.10 Finally, but most importantly, my thesis is of interest to normative political theorists. I argue that the meaning of Walzer’s work has been lost to them because of their failure to adopt a historicist or contextualized methodology in interpreting his work. There are many ways in which this is so, but the principal one is as follows: many scholars working in the tradition of analytic philosophy have been puzzled by how Walzer’s “communitarianism”, which seems to them inherently conservative, can be reconciled with his commitment to egalitarian political principles. I argue that the label of communitarian, which has frequently been applied to Walzer in virtue of his interpretive methodology, is misleading. There are, as Walzer acknowledges, communitarian aspects of his thought, most notably the ‘supreme emergency’ argument. However, Walzer is first and foremost a social democrat. His insistence that political theorists should interpret our shared values and that justice requires being faithful to the shared understandings of particular communities arises out of his involvement with American radical democracy and its engagement with debates in American public life.