Michael Walzer — Spheres of Justice, Just and Unjust Wars, and the Philosophy of Connected Criticism (b. 1935)

Michael Laban Walzer is an American political philosopher and public intellectual — born in New York City on 3 March 1935 into a Jewish family, who graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1956 where he studied under Irving Howe — the socialist literary critic who co-founded Dissent — and Lewis Coser, his introduction to the New York Intellectuals. He held a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge in 1956–57, earned his PhD in government at Harvard in 1961 under Samuel Beer, taught at Princeton from 1962 to 1966, at Harvard from 1966 to 1980, and has been at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 1980, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He co-edited Dissent — the democratic socialist quarterly — for three decades, and is editor emeritus. He has written twenty-seven books and over three hundred articles on just war, distributive justice, social criticism, nationalism, tolerance, political obligation, and the Jewish political tradition.

In 1971 he taught a semester-long course at Harvard with Robert Nozick titled "Capitalism and Socialism" — an explicit debate between two positions. Nozick's side appeared as "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (1974). Walzer's side appeared as "Spheres of Justice" (1983). The two books together constitute the most important exchange in American political philosophy of the late twentieth century.

His central concern, consistent across sixty years of work: that political philosophy must be grounded in the actual traditions and shared understandings of particular communities rather than derived from abstract universal principles — and that this does not collapse into relativism but supports a form of engaged, "connected" social criticism more compelling than the criticism available from a view from nowhere.

Just and Unjust Wars — Ethics in the Exception

"Just and Unjust Wars" (1977) grew directly from Walzer's engagement with the Vietnam War — from the experience of being a member of the antiwar movement while simultaneously trying to think clearly about what made the war unjust and what would distinguish it from a war that might be just. The book was unusual in the field it entered: most academic thinking about war either embraced realism (morality was irrelevant to war, which was governed purely by interest and power) or embraced pacifism (all war was wrong). Walzer rejected both. Realism was false to the actual experience of soldiers and commanders who made moral judgments in the field and held each other to them. Pacifism was too demanding — it denied the legitimacy of defensive war and left the vulnerable without justification for resistance.

His method was to recover the tradition of just war theory — from Augustine through medieval canon law to Grotius and Vattel — and to test and refine it against a wide range of historical cases: the Athenian attack on Melos, the German submarine campaign, the Allied bombing of Dresden, the American use of atomic weapons, the My Lai massacre. The result was a morally serious account of when wars could be justified (the doctrine of jus ad bellum — just cause, right intention, proportionality, last resort, declaration by legitimate authority) and what limits applied to their conduct (jus in bello — discrimination between combatants and civilians, proportionality in means). The two doctrines were independent of each other: a just war could be fought unjustly, and an unjust war could include individual acts of justice. Soldiers on both sides of an unjust war shared equal combatant rights — they could be killed without being murdered.

"Just and Unjust Wars is a revitalization of just war theory that insists on the importance of ethics in wartime while eschewing pacifism. In war not all actions are equal — a just war exists and must be implemented through a strict display of rules."

Spheres of Justice — Complex Equality Against Simple Tyranny

"Spheres of Justice" (1983) was Walzer's most systematic work in political philosophy — his explicit answer to both Rawls's liberal egalitarianism and Nozick's libertarianism. His argument began from a simple observation: different goods — money, political power, education, health care, honor, love — had different social meanings in different communities. The meaning of a good determined the principles by which it should be distributed. Medical care, which communities understood as meeting basic human need, should be distributed according to need. Political office, which communities understood as carrying public responsibility, should be distributed according to democratic procedures. Money, earned through market exchange, should be distributed according to the logic of markets.

Justice — in Walzer's account — was not a matter of achieving equality in one master metric (welfare, resources, primary goods) across all dimensions of life. It was a matter of maintaining the integrity of separate "spheres," each with its own distributive principle, and preventing any good from "tyrannizing" — from crossing sphere boundaries and converting itself into power over other goods. The paradigm of injustice was money buying political influence, health care, or educational advantage. This was not because money was illegitimate in its own sphere — but because its dominance in other spheres violated their internal logic. "Complex equality" meant that no citizen's standing in one sphere could determine her standing in another.

"Complex equality means that no citizen's standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere. Citizen X may be chosen over citizen Y for political office, and they will be unequal in the sphere of politics — but they will not be unequal generally so long as X's office gives him no advantages over Y in any other sphere."

— Walzer, Spheres of Justice

Interpretation and Social Criticism — The Connected Critic

"Interpretation and Social Criticism" (1987) addressed the question of where social criticism comes from and what gives it authority. Walzer identified three paths available to the social critic. The first — "discovery" — sought a moral standpoint external to any particular society, from which its practices could be judged by universal standards. This was the path of natural law, of Platonic philosophy, of much liberal theory. The second — "invention" — sought to construct moral standards through rational procedures (Rawls's veil of ignorance, Habermas's ideal speech situation) that stripped away particular commitments to reach universal principles. The third — "interpretation" — worked from within the shared understandings of a community, holding those understandings up to the standards the community itself professed, and exposing the gap between profession and practice.

Walzer advocated the third path — "connected criticism" — arguing that it was both more accurate to the way criticism actually worked and more effective rhetorically. The prophets of Israel were not Kantian philosophers applying universal principles — they were Israelites arguing that Israel was failing to live up to the covenant Israel itself had made. The most powerful criticism was internal, holding a community to its own best self rather than judging it by standards it had never claimed to accept. This did not collapse into relativism — some communal practices were simply wrong — but it shaped how criticism was most honestly and most effectively delivered.

"The prophets of Israel are the model of 'connected criticism': not philosophers applying universal principles from outside, but insiders arguing that Israel was failing to live up to the covenant it had itself made. The most powerful criticism holds a community to its own best self."

Thick and Thin — Moral Pluralism with Moral Constraints

"Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad" (1994) addressed the question of cross-cultural moral standards — how people from different moral traditions could share moral judgments without presupposing a single universal morality. Walzer's distinction was between "thick" and "thin" moral discourse. Thick morality was the full, contextually embedded moral vocabulary of a particular culture — its values, its history, its specific practices and institutions. Thin morality was the stripped-down, minimal moral vocabulary shared across cultures: basic prohibitions on murder, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment; elementary requirements of honesty and fair dealing; basic human rights.

These thin moral standards were not derived from abstract universal principles but were overlapping elements of many thick moralities — points where different communities' moral worlds happened to converge. They could be invoked across cultural boundaries without requiring that everyone share the same thick moral framework. The image that prompted the book was of Eastern Europeans in 1989 marching for "truth" and "justice" — words that everyone recognized across cultural boundaries even though what they meant in full, thick moral context differed.

"The thin morality shared across cultures is not derived from abstract principles — it is the overlapping consensus of many thick moralities, the points where different communities' moral worlds converge. It can be invoked cross-culturally without requiring a shared thick framework."

Communitarianism — A Label He Resists

Walzer is regularly described as a "communitarian" — alongside MacIntyre and Sandel — and regularly resists the label. What he shares with communitarianism is the argument that political theory must be grounded in the traditions and cultures of particular societies rather than derived from universal abstract principles, and that individuals are constituted by their communities in ways that liberal theory of the Rawlsian variety tends to underweight. What he resists is the association of communitarianism with conservatism — as if the upshot of taking community seriously was to defend existing arrangements against change. His own politics were consistently on the democratic left. His Dissent editorship, his opposition to the Vietnam War, his support for democratic socialism, his sustained engagement with questions of economic justice — all marked him as a critic of existing arrangements who believed that the resources for that criticism came from inside communities, not from a perspective above or outside them.

"He has long argued that political theory must be grounded in the traditions and culture of particular societies, and has long opposed what he sees to be the excessive abstraction of political philosophy — while maintaining consistently democratic socialist political commitments."

Legacy — The Public Philosopher

Walzer has been unusually consistent in combining philosophical argument with public intellectual engagement — bringing the resources of political philosophy to bear on actual political questions in Dissent and The New Republic and The New York Times without sacrificing philosophical rigor, and bringing the realities of political life to bear on philosophical abstractions without sacrificing ethical seriousness. "Just and Unjust Wars" — originally motivated by Vietnam — became required reading at West Point and has been used by US military officers to think about the ethics of combat for decades. "Spheres of Justice" remains one of the most distinctive accounts of distributive justice in contemporary political philosophy.

"He does not have a one-size-fits-all theory of justice but finds that it is always adjudicated in particular contexts. Walzer's communitarianism is rooted in the conviction that we are all members of political communities before we are bearers of rights — and that whether we have a right to a particular good depends on the role that good plays in our communal life."