Michael Walzer

J. Toby Reiner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509526338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Michael Walzer is one of the world's most important political thinkers, whose major works, such as Spheres of Justice and Just and Unjust Wars, have transformed many central debates in contemporary political philosophy. In this book, Toby J. Reiner provides the most wide-ranging and up-to-date introduction to his work available. Reiner examines his writings on topics ranging from justice in war, humanitarian intervention and migration ethics to distributive justice, multiculturalism, and the political role of religion. Situating Walzer's thought in the intellectual environment of post-war American leftist politics, Reiner demonstrates the importance of his attempt to provide a social-democratic alternative to liberalism, Marxism, and post-modernism. He shows that Walzer has developed a novel approach to political theory based on the thesis that human communities construct the values that give meaning to their lives, giving his work a significance that goes well beyond political theory, into political and social science more broadly. Reiner not only gives a crystal clear guide to Walzer's ideas for students of political philosophy and general readers, but also develops an original and illuminating new interpretation of his thought that no political theorist can afford to miss.

1
The Justice of Resorting to War

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

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

Against Vietnam

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

As a result, even while participating in the movement against the American war in Vietnam, Walzer objected to most of the common arguments against that war, in particular those that sympathized with the communism of the North Vietnamese government and of the Vietcong (Howe and Walzer 1979: 15, Chomsky, Morgenthau, and Walzer 1978: 390–1). While the USA would have been entitled to support an indigenous anti-communist movement – indeed, Walzer would have done so himself – it could not replace an indigenous communist regime with a dictatorship of its own, no matter how benevolent it felt itself to be. The “ghastliness” (Walzer 1968d: 13) of the war consisted in the combination of two particular features, on Walzer’s view. First, it was “partly an inherited colonial war” in which the USA, like colonial France before it, refused to accept the right of the Vietnamese people to collective self-determination (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). This meant that the war could not be won, because the government of North Vietnam and the Vietcong “had succeeded in appropriating the historical energies of Vietnamese nationalism” (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). Although those movements were not, Walzer insisted, part of a global progressive cause, they had the loyalty of the vast majority of the Vietnamese people, which meant that the American war in Vietnam was not one against a hostile regime, but rather against an entire people. This made the government of South Vietnam illegitimate, which meant that the US intervention had to be understood as furthering its own geopolitical goals, not those of Vietnam (Walzer 2015a: 98–9). In short, the US did not “respect the character and dimensions of the Vietnamese civil war” (Walzer 2015a: 100). The US cause as a whole was akin to those military leaders who, faced with local intransigence to American goals, believed that, to save a particular village, they would have to destroy it. Walzer holds that the American war could be won only if it obliterated, rather than restoring, Vietnamese society, which is why US officers often felt forced to target entire villages (see Walzer 2015a: 309–16, on the My Lai massacre).

Walzer’s second objection was that the war was the result of Cold War ideology (Schrecker and Walzer 1965, Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). The geopolitical goals for which the US fought involved the containment of communism, and resulted from the struggle between the US and the Soviet Union (and, later, China). Again, it is important to emphasize that Walzer did not sympathize with the Soviet government; indeed, for Walzer and Dissent, one of the major challenges for an American socialism was avoiding the collapse into authoritarianism of the Soviet experiment. However, the goal of containment did not make the war legitimate, because it clashed with the moral requirement of “[w]orking for a bit of freedom in third world countries” such as Vietnam (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17–18). While such a task might have been stymied by the dominance of Soviet-style communism within both the North Vietnamese government and the Vietcong, this did not make the war legitimate. Rather, it suggests that Walzer’s opposition to the war had “no happy ending to offer” (Howe and Walzer 1979: 18), but nonetheless insisted that American geopolitical hostility to Soviet communism could not legitimately be pursued at the expense of Vietnamese lives and self-determination.

At the heart of Walzer’s opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, then, is the claim that the Vietnamese people must determine for themselves their system of government. This belief, rooted in Walzer’s version of social democracy, which insists that each community must govern itself by its own standards, was to become a central plank of his just-war theory, most notably in the claim that almost all just wars are fought in defense of national sovereignty. It recurs throughout Walzer’s work in the claim that communities need a protected space for their common life.

In Defense of Just-War Theory

In 1977, much recent work on justice in war was by Christian theologians (see especially Ramsey 1968). In part, this reflected the Christian roots of the subject: as far back as Augustine (354–430CE), Christian thinkers had grappled with the dilemmas of political sovereignty by arguing that the use of force is justified in defense of a Christian community. Christian thinkers in medieval Europe, such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), invented the division of just wars into two parts, one focusing on the outbreak of war (jus ad bellum) and the other on the conduct of war (jus in bello). Early-modern thinkers such as Hugo Grotius applied military ethics to the European wars of religion and voyages of conquest (for overview, see Orend 2013: 14–18). Christian just-war theory rests on the idea of natural moral law that applies at all times and in all places (Anscombe 2006: 623). Christian thinkers have typically held that there are seven criteria that must all be met for resort to war to be justified: just cause, right intention, just means, reasonable hope of success, last resort, proportionality, and declaration by a competent authority (for example, Anscombe 2006: 624–9). Violating any of these is absolutely prohibited, which led Anscombe to argue in 1939 that British consideration of bombing Germany cities made World War II – for Walzer, the paradigm of a just war (Walzer 1971b) – unjust. Christian just-war theory is a type of deontological ethics, because it stipulates a set of principles that are binding in all cases.

Secular thought on war in the 1960s was dominated by realist theories of international relations. Realism holds that moral judgments about war are meaningless. We might not like certain military campaigns, but that is a question of taste equivalent to dislike of foods or colors. As the saying goes, all’s fair in love and war. The realist argument asserts that states are motivated only by considerations of national interest, that they lack the freedom to make moral choices, and that there is no fixed international morality with reference to which they might make choices (see Orend 2000: 62–3). Added to the influence of realism was the dominance of utilitarian moral thinking. Utilitarianism judges morality by considering consequences, and is skeptical of the sort of absolute prohibition invoked by Christian just-war theory. Before he can advance a theory of just war, Walzer has to refute realism by establishing that judgments of justice in war are meaningful. By basing his theory on defense of human rights to life and liberty, Walzer provides a secular anchor for a non-Christian audience, while he attempts to balance reliance on the deontological notion of rights with some elements of utilitarianism, taking just-war principles to be binding in almost all cases (see his doctrine of “supreme emergency,” Walzer 2015a: 251–68, discussed in Chapter 2).

Realists hold that war is a realm of necessity in which states and soldiers are engaged in a struggle for survival such that they have no meaningful choices concerning their courses of action. Because of the moral principle that “ought implies can,” in the absence of choice, it follows that no actions can be wrong. If combatants do what they must, it is impossible to criticize them morally. In analyzing this argument, Walzer focuses on the version that the Greek historian Thucydides advances in his History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 1954). The crucial part of the text is the “Melian Dialogue” (400–8), in which Thucydides tells the story of the attempts of colonial Athens to persuade the small island nation of Melos to submit to Athenian rule. Melos was an ally of Sparta, so the Melians refused to submit in the hope that Sparta would come to their aid. As a result, Athens invaded and conquered Melos. Commenting that this is a “classic account of aggression” akin to, say, Nazi Germany invading Poland, Walzer notes that the dialogue in which the Athenians seek to persuade Melos to submit is the “climax of [Thucydides’] realism” because he puts into the mouths of the Athenian generals party to the debate speech that is unusually frank about the impossibility of justice during war (Walzer 2015a: 5). The Athenians make no moral claim to deserve their empire, nor any pretense of Melos having harmed them. Rather, they insist that such matters are irrelevant because “the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel … the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept” (Thucydides 1954: 402). As Walzer notes, this claim is not just a descriptive one: Athens has to conquer those territories that it can, because failure to extend its empire would reveal weakness and encourage rebellion. Mighty Athens, like tiny Melos, must face up to the “burdens of necessity” in war (Walzer 2015a: 4–6).

The interesting thing about the Melian Dialogue is that, although in much of the rest of his History, Thucydides “set himself a standard of accuracy … [that] was quite extraordinary in the fifth century,” (Thucydides 1954: 19), the Dialogue is his invention. What Thucydides has the generals say is not what he thought they said in Melos but what he thinks is the necessary true meaning of combatants in their position (Walzer 2015a: 6–8). Criticizing this notion of necessity, Walzer notes that Thucydides does not report on the debate in the Athenian assembly about which policy to adopt with regard to Melos. This is significant, because it allows Thucydides to blur the fact that, in ancient Greek as in modern English, “necessary” may mean either “inevitable” or “indispensable” (8–10). This is a crucial distinction, because the realist position relies upon defining military actions as “inevitable,” yet the Athenians could hardly have argued in their assembly that invading Melos was inevitable. If it were, no discussion could take place. In the Athenian assembly, Walzer insists, the question must hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 The Justice of Resorting to War
• 2 Justified Conduct in War
• 3 Complex Equality and the “Spheres of Justice”
• 4 Complex Equality and the Social Democratic Critique of Liberalism
• 5 The Challenge of Diversity
• 6 Justice Beyond Borders
• 7 Religion and Politics
• 8 Interpretive Method and Social Criticism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement