Michael Walzer

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Name
Michael Walzer
Birth March 3, 1935
Flag of the United States
School/tradition Analytic · Political Philosophy
Main interests Human Rights  · Ethics · Just War Theory  · Liberalism  · Communitarianism  · Value pluralism  · Social Criticism  · Internationalism
Influenced by Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor, Albert Camus
Influenced Michael Sandel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amy Gutmann, Michael W. Doyle,

Michael Walzer (3 March 1935) is one of America's leading political philosophers and public intellectuals. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is co-editor of the political-intellectual quarterly Dissent. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation and is a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many scholarly journals.

Walzer is usually identified as one of the leading proponents of the "Communitarian" position in political theory, along with Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel. Like Sandel and MacIntyre, Walzer is not completely comfortable with this label. He has, however, long argued that political theory must be grounded in the traditions and culture of particular societies and opposed what he sees to be the excessive abstraction of political philosophy. His most important intellectual contributions include a revitalization of just war theory that insists on the importance of ethics in wartime while eschewing pacifism; the theory of "complex equality," which holds that the metric of just equality is not some single material or moral good, but rather that egalitarian justice demands that each good be distributed according to its social meaning, and that no good (like money or political power) be allowed to dominate or distort the distribution of goods in other spheres; and an argument that justice is primarily a moral standard within particular nations and societies, not one that can be developed in a universalized abstraction.

In April 2008, Walzer received the prestigious Spinoza Lens, a bi-annual prize for ethics in The Netherlands.

He is the older brother of historian Judith Walzer Leavitt.

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[edit] Education

In 1956 Walzer graduated Summa cum laude from Brandeis University with a B.A. in History. He then studied at the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright Fellowship (1956-1957) and completed his doctoral work at Harvard, earning his Ph.D. in Government in 1961.

[edit] Employment

Walzer was first employed as a professor in 1962 by Princeton University. He stayed there until 1966 when he moved to Harvard. He taught at Harvard until 1980 when he became a Permanent Faculty Member in the School of Social Science at the IAS.

[edit] Tributes

Perhaps the highest honor a scholar can achieve is serious attention given by other scholars to his body of work; in this regard Walzer has been greatly honored.

Among works of scholarship that seek to apply Walzer's ideas on Just and Unjust Wars to real situations are: Yaacov Lozowick's Right to Exist.[1]

[edit] Published works

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources and external links

For an analysis of communitarianism see: Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003]