A Connected Critic
Can Michael Walzer Connect High-Modernity with Tradition?
This work is the fruit of a seven year research in the University of Leuven. It first appeared in the form of a dissertation in 2003.
Studying in Europe is a wonderful adventure. From time to time, I have travelled to other European countries to get a first hand knowledge of the cities, the people, and their life. I would like to thank them for their hospitality. Thanks go particularly to the Belgians, my host, and to the residents of Leuven where I have spent most of my time. I am grateful to the European people for giving me an opportunity to understand their life, their social establishments, their history, and their culture. This experience has enriched and refined my framework of perception. Had I not lived in Europe, I might not have acquired the perspective to understand properly the paper world in the books. I am also very grateful to the university, my alma mater, who has provided me with an excellent learning environment, and granted me a scholarship through the Interfaculty Council for Development Co-operation from 1999 to 2003.
Another half of my adventure is intellectual and spiritual. It is done mostly in the lecture halls, in the libraries, at home, on my writing desk, and in my bed. For this part of the journey, I have to thank the professors of Leuven, especially the professors of the Faculty of Theology. Many of their lectures have stimulated my thought, and I have integrated their valuable ideas in my dissertation here and there. One name I do like to mention is Professor Johan Verstraeten. He has been my promoter for the entire eight years of my study. I am grateful for his teaching, his guidance, his encouragement, and his help. I appreciate deeply his criticism and his tolerance, through which he exposes my weaknesses without imposing himself. My wife Ka Yee is another name I would like to mention. Ka Yee is the boon companion of my adventure. She has had her own adventure, there is no doubt about it. But she has been my companion in the physical journey, and sometimes she joins me as well in my intellectual and spiritual journey. She has read my manuscript, criticized me, and improved my grammar and style. In my hard times, she would also take up extra housework. I sincerely thank her for all the things she has done for me. Looking back to the past years, I must say I am greatly content with my adventure.
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Michael Walzer is one of the most prominent contemporary critics of liberal society. The critical quality and the import of his writings are recognized by both friends and foes. His works are widely read and commented. A collection of literature has thus gradually built up. The opinions of Walzer’s critics are contradictory, and some of them are even formulated on the basis of inaccurate interpretations of Walzer. Moreover, most of the critiques are piecemeal journal articles centring around the just war theory and the theory of distributive justice. Few critics, if not none, have attempted to connect the former universalist theory with the latter particularist one, let alone to construct an overall view of Walzer’s ethical theory.
This dissertation undertakes to accomplish two objectives in the view of filling in the aforesaid gap. One is to clarify and elaborate Walzer's theory, and the other to represent it in a comprehensive and systematic way. But a word has to be said as to why they should be done by a religious ethicist. In the first place, Walzer is a careful observer and a penetrating critic of liberal society and liberal theory. Through his criticism, we can gain a better understanding of the dominant social structures and their legitimating ideas. What is more, Walzer is following the example of the ancient Israelite prophets in his practice of social criticism. His career can be seen as a continuation of the prophetic tradition. The main task of prophet is to articulate the deepest aspirations of the people, which is embedded in their shared understandings. Walzer thinks that this task should also be the task of modern social critics. He thus dares to go into the morass of cultural traditions, to try to uncover the deepest aspirations of modern men and women, and to express them in their common language. This prophetic social criticism can to a large extent connect the deracinated modern man to his root. The exegete Walter Bruggemann, in a review of Walzer's book Exodus and Revolution, recognizes his effort in connecting biblical narrative with contemporary political theory and practice, and praises his contribution to interdisciplinary conversation.1“What is important about this book is not what is said,” Bruggemann comments, “for it has been said before … What is important is that Walzer says it.… what he has accomplished is to show the enduring practical power of the Exodus narrative to be a source and legitimation of revolutionary thought and action…. Exodus and Revolution is welcome because it invites interdisciplinary conversation around fresh stirrings in Scripture study.” (W. Bruggemann, Review of M. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution [New York, NY, 1985], in The Christian Century, 27 November 1985, pp. 1098-1099.) Such remarks can actually be applied to Walzer's critical career as a whole. He has demonstrated one of the effective ways to revive the prophetic spirit in the modern world.
The primary audiences in my mind are the Western readers and my fellow countrymen. They are two different groups of people. I will try my best to find a balance between their concerns. At the same time I will not ignore the broader audience, to them I will try to make myself understandable. The parts of the world where I have lived are liberal societies. I am committed to the concerns of ordinary people and intend to empower them to live a more conscious life by providing them with a coherent view of the moral world they live in. With such purpose in mind, I am convinced by Walzer that moral theory is best to be couched in the common language understandable by ordinary people.
For a correct interpretation of Walzer's writings, it is crucial to locate him in the current map of thought. Recently, two trends have emerged and posed themselves as rivals to liberalism. They are commonly known as communitarianism and postmodernism. It seems to me that neither of them can adequately explain Walzer's project. Very often Walzer is categorized under the banner of communitarianism. If we take the broad meaning of communitarianism as a re-emphasis on the importance of culture and community, Walzer's theory can indeed be regarded as a communitarian critique of liberalism. However, there are signs revealing that Walzer intends to distance himself from the communitarians. First of all, Walzer never admits he is a communitarian, rather he repeatedly calls himself a “social democrat.” In the article titled The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism, Walzer criticizes the communitarian endeavour as a meaningful but futile action. According to his analysis, liberalism is the mainstream political thought of modernity, and communitarian critique is but a recurrent feature of liberal politics and social organization. Communitarianism cannot exist without liberalism: it is a parasite of liberalism. In contrast, social democracy, notwithstanding the fact that it is a communitarian critique, has established for itself a permanent place in modern politics. Its success lies in the social democrats’ acceptance of the market economy. They share the same commitment as the liberals to economic growth, but they deal with the subsequent social problems differently. This strategy has succeeded in promoting democratic socialism as an alternative to liberalism.2M. Walzer, The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism, in Political Theory 18 (1990) 6-23, pp. 6-7.
Could Walzer's writings be seen as a kind of postmodern theory? Apparently, socialism has long been regarded as the post-capitalist social structure. Some people even believe that socialism will finally replace capitalism and become the dominant organizing ideal. Since capitalism is one of the main institutions of modernity, its downfall will definitely inaugurate a new social epoch. If Walzer is interpreted in this line of thinking, he may be called a postmodern theorist. But this is not how Walzer understands himself. In fact, he never acknowledges that he is a postmodern thinker. He seldom mentions the word “postmodernity.” To my knowledge, Walzer only discusses postmodernity in the last part of his book On Toleration, where he discerns the appearance of a new social phenomenon—the multicultural selves, especially in immigrant societies, which may perhaps be called a postmodern condition.3Cf. M. Walzer, On Toleration, New Haven, CT – London, 1997, p. 87. He then goes on to speculate whether this postmodern condition will eventually force him to rewrite his socialist programme. In the end, he insists that his programme is capable of accommodating the new condition. Indeed, the postmodern theory cannot adequately handle the tension between multiculturalism and individualism. Walzer believes that democratic socialism is the best political creed that can defend the kind of toleration needed in multicultural societies.
Walzer is neither a communitarian nor a postmodern theorist. He is rather a connected, marginal liberal critic who criticizes liberalism for its own sake. He is not trying to replace liberalism with some new theory of his own, he is simply working out a sociologically accurate liberal theory that matches more closely to the existing liberal society. Walzer observes that liberalism cannot satisfactorily deal with some situations emerged in the process of modernization. He sees it as his duty to derive an improved version of liberalism that will better serve modernity. Since his methodology, argumentation, and political proposals are distinctively different from traditional liberalism, his theory deserves the new name “democratic socialism.”
How should we then understand the newness in Walzer's theory? I suggest that it should be interpreted, to borrow Anthony Giddens’s words, as a “high modernity”—“as modernity coming to understand itself rather than the overcoming of modernity as such.”4A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA, 1990, p. 48. Modernity is a critical enterprise. It is critical of tradition. But when it is in its early stage, it is not critical enough of itself. When modernity reaches its maturity, it becomes conscious or reflexive of its own true nature. It is driven by its nature to criticize itself. A mature modernity comes to acknowledge that it cannot reform the world as it wishes, and that it has to adapt itself to the consequences of modernization. Walzer's criticism of liberalism is best understood as such. His theory is a liberalism of a mature kind, which attempts to re-connect modern men and women to the existing but suppressed tradition.
Walzer is hardly a systematic writer. One should not expect him to confine himself within a neatly constructed theoretical framework. Nevertheless, I choose to present him systematically in order to help my readers understand him. As it is a project on Walzer, I would limit the promotion of my own ideas so that the readers can see his portrait rather than my own. And in so doing, I hope to give the author his due respect.
The content of the dissertation is divided into six chapters. The first three chapters deal with the theoretical dimensions of Walzer's ethical theory while the rest with practical moral issues. Walzer's basic ethical standpoint will be developed at the outset. Walzer has proposed a new ethical position, namely particularism, which holds that moral culture is particular per se, but contains nonetheless some universal elements. His ongoing task then is to try to formulate a particularism that can accommodate universalism. Since he has argued for particularism in various ways, a historical approach may best serve to clarify his position.
Chapter Two explores the theoretical foundation of Walzer's ethic--shared understanding. Walzer claims that his is a non-foundational ethic. Though Walzer refuses to connect his overall ethical theory to the nature of man, or to God, or to the cosmos, an investigation of his works shows that his theory has in fact a sociological/anthropological foundation, which supports his particularist position. What “non-foundational” really means is that the foundation needs not be systematically laid down. Since this approach has caused serious confusion, it is necessary to elucidate it further. Chapter Three continues to explore the interpretive method that is used to access the shared understandings. We will first establish the statement that ethics is mostly interpretive before we go on to extract, in the light of Fernand Braudel’s social time, four interpretive principles from Walzer's writings.
Chapter Four investigates the reference point from which an intellectual can criticize the world. The Greek philosopher Archimedes is thought to have boasted: Show me a reference point, and I will move the earth. A reference point is also crucial for social criticism. But modern critical theorists try to defy this rule and propose instead detachment. They claim that detachment is the primary requisite of a social critic. Walzer opts for the traditional wisdom rather than the modern one. He opines that detachment is the main cause for the failure of the twentieth-century socialist movement, and insists that connection is necessary for a successful critical enterprise. For him, the topic intellectual is the ideal social critic. To prove his case, he erects the Israelite prophet as a paradigm of social criticism and substantiates his argument with the lives of eleven modern critics. We will argue that on the one hand Walzer's prophetic criticism is a plausible paradigm for modern social critics, but on the other it is not entirely prophetic. Moreover, some of Walzer's “true” critics do not comfortably fit into his prophetic paradigm. These critics, we will demonstrate, actually belong to another company of social critics which has its origin in Jesus of Nazareth.
After locating the standpoint of Walzer's topic intellectuals, we will proceed to Walzer's theory of domestic justice in Chapter Five. It is not surprising that as a topic intellectual, Walzer takes a particularist approach in his discussion of distributive justice. He argues not only that justice is particular, but also that liberal society has separate spheres which operate according to their own principles of justice. But the autonomous operations in the spheres should never be allowed to undermine membership for the very reason that the existence of a political community is to foster a particular national identity. We will focus our discussion on three main issues: (1) liberal society has separate spheres of justice; (2) a mature liberalism necessarily passes into democratic socialism; (3) complex equality is a more plausible form of equality. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of Walzer's conception of a mature modern society and to clarify the above issues.
The final chapter turns from domestic society to international society. Our topic intellectual is not indifferent to international affairs. On the contrary, Walzer concerns himself very much with the morality of war. Standing though on a particularist ground, he has no difficulty in finding a universal moral language to address the just use of violence in international relations. We will show that his interpretation of war morality from the deontological perspective is inconsistent, and that the overall structure of his argument is only partly correct. We will also contend that his argument for the mass killing of innocent people in supreme emergency is both unsubstantiated and morally wrong. As for the other issues in international relations, Walzer's chief objective is to maintain a balance of power. His proposals on the subjects of national toleration, national liberation and the future world system are not original. But his contribution of a political structure of signification is helpful for a better understanding of the characteristics of a global régime.