Michael Walzer

Spheres of justice : a defense of pluralism and equality

* Complex Equality * Membership * Security and Welfare * Money and Commodities * Office * Hard Work * Free Time * Education * Kinship and Love * Divine Grace * Recognition * Political Power * Tyrannies and Just Societies

The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism

Intellectual fashions are notoriously short-lived, very much like fashions in popular music, art, or dress. But there are certain fashions that seem regularly to reappear. Like pleated trousers or short skirts, they are inconstant features of a larger and more steadily prevailing phenomenon in this case, a certain way of dressing. They have brief but recurrent lives; we know their transience and except their return. Needless to say, there is no afterlife in which trousers will be permanently pleated or skirts forever short. Recurrence is all. Although it operates at a much higher level (an infinitely higher level?) of cultural significance, the communitarian critique of liberalism is like the pleating of trousers: transient but certain to return. It is a consistently intermittent feature of liberal politics and social organization. No liberal success will make it permanently unattractive. At the same time, no communitarian critique, however penetrating, will ever be anything more than an inconstant feature of liberalism. Someday, perhaps, there will be a larger transformation, like the shift from aristocratic knee-breeches to plebian pants, rendering liberalism and its critics alike irrelevant. But I see no present signs of anything like that, nor am I sure that we should look forward to it. For now, there is much to be said for a recurrent critique, whose protagonists hope only for small victories, partial incorporations, and when they are rebuffed or dismissed or coopted, fade away for a time only to return. Communitarianism is usefully contrasted with social democracy, which has succeeded in establishing a permanent presence alongside of and some-

Obligations : essays on disobedience, war, and citizenship

* Introduction * Part 1: Disobedience *1. The Obligation to Disobey *2. Civil Disobedience and Corporate Authority *3. The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities * Appendix: On the Responsibility of Intellectuals * Part 2: War *4. The Obligation to Die for the State *5. Political Alienation and Military Service *6. Conscientious Objection *7. Prisoners of War: Does the Fight Continue After the Battle? * Part 3: Citizenship *8. The Obligation to Live for the State *9. Political Solidarity and Personal Honor *10. The Problem of Citizenship Appendix: Three Kinds of Citizenship *11. A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen * Index

Pluralism, Justice, and Equality

The essays in this book by a group of leading political theorists assess and develop the central ideas of Michael Walzers path-breaking Spheres of Justice. Is social justice a radically plural notion, with its principles determined by the different social goods that men and women allocate to one another? Is it possible to prevent the unequal distribution of money and power from distorting the allocation of other goods? If different goods are distributed by different mechanisms, what (if any) kind of social equality is possible? Are there universal principles of justice which apply regardless of context? These and other related questions are pursued in depth by the contributors. The book concludes with an important new essay by Walzer in which he reflects on the positions taken in his original book in the light of the critical appraisals presented here.

Pleasures and Costs of Urbanity

In vitro method for assessing thyroid function based on an indirect estimation of the free thyroxine concentration of a sample of serum. Known amounts of a sample of serum to be tested and a radioactive labeled thyroxine solution are added to an alkaline crosslinked dextran gel column which serves to dissociate the serum thyroxine bound to thyroxine binding proteins. After washing the serum proteins from the column, a portion of the mixture of labeled and serum thyroxine is eluted from the column using a known amount of the serum sample and a known amount of eluting liquid containing thyroxine binding protein. The use of a portion of the serum sample normalizes the elution of free thyroxine against the thyroxine binding capacity of the serum sample. By comparing the percent labeled thyroxine retained in the column in testing the serum sample to the percent retained in testing a reference sample representing a known thyroid condition, a free thyroxine equivalent value is obtained which is useful in differentiating hyperthyroid, euthyroid, and hypothyroid conditions. The method can be modified to provide a means for determining the total thyroxine concentration of the serum sample, as well as its free thyroxine equivalent.

Passion and politics

Passion is a hidden issue behind or at the heart of, contemporary theoretical debates about nationalism, identity politics and religious fundamentalism. It is not that reason and passion cannot be conceptually distinguished. They are, however, always entangled in practice – and this entanglement itself requires a conceptual account. So it is my ambition to blur the line between reason and passion: to rationalize (some of) the passions and to impassion reason. Passionate intensity has a legitimate place in the social world. This extension of rational legitimacy to the political passions seems to me a useful revision of liberal theory which has been too pre-occupied in recent years with the construction of dispassionate deliberative procedures. It opens the way for better accounts of social connection and conflict and for more explicit and self-conscious answers to the unavoidable political questions: which side are you on?

The Politics of Difference: Statehood and Toleration in a Multicultural World

The author identifies four possible attitudes of tolerance toward groups with different ways of life: resignation, indifference, curiosity and enthusiasm. He explores the potential for these attitudes and concludes by discussing the role of boundaries within communities in modernism and postmodernism. The author is not going to focus on toleration of eccentric or dissident individuals in civil society; he is interested in individual rights primarily when they are exercised in common—in the course of voluntary association or religious worship or cultural elaboration—or when they are claimed by groups on behalf of their members.

Regime Change and Just War

Allied policy at the end of the Second World War reminds us that regime change can be justified in the aftermath of a just war. Michael Walzer argues that a more indirect approach to regime change can also be justified before (and instead of) a just war—indeed, the success of this approach would render war unnecessary and therefore unjust. And if we commit ourselves to that indirection, if we commit ourselves to the forceful containment of brutal regimes, to collective security, we may find that we can reach justice without the terrible destructiveness of war.

States and Minorities

The heterogeneity of ethnic and religious groups is a constant feature of political life, and it has been encompassed within four different sorts of political structures: empires, federations, multinational states, and nation- states. Small and weak groups have sometimes found safety, and they have sometimes found danger, within each of these structures. For the members of such groups, there is no single best structure, but one can specify helpful principles appropriate to each of the four.

Exodus 32 and the Theory of Holy War: The History of a Citation

Throughout much of the history of political thought in the West, the Bible was at once a constitutional document and a kind of case book, putatively setting limits to speculation as well as to conduct. Theologians and political theorists were forced to be judges interpreting a text or, more often, lawyers defending a particular interpretation before the constituted powers in church and state or before the less authoritative court of opinion. The Bible became, like other such texts, a dissociated collection of precedents, examples and citations, each of which meant what the lawyers and judges said it meant.