Thick and Thin Moral Argument at Home and Abroad Michael Walzer

When Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice was published ten years ago, the front page of The New York Times Book Review hailed the work as "an imaginative alternative to the current debate over distributive justice". Now in Thick and Thin, Walzer revises and extends his arguments in Spheres of Justice, framing his ideas about justice, social criticism, and national identity in light of the new political world that has arisen in the past decade. Walzer focuses on two different but interrelated kinds of moral argument: maximalist and minimalist, thick and thin, local and universal. According to Walzer the first, thick type of moral argument is culturally connected, referentially entangled, detailed, and specific; the second, or thin type, is abstract, ad hoc, detached, and general. Thick arguments play the larger role in determining our views about domestic justice and in shaping our criticism of local arrangements. Thin arguments shape our views about justice in foreign places and in international society. The book begins with an account of minimalist argument, then examines two uses of maximalist arguments, focusing on distributive justice and social criticism. Walzer then discusses minimalism with a qualified defense of self-determination in international society, and concludes with a discussion of the (divided) self capable of this differentiated moral engagement. Walzer's highly literate and fascinating blend of philosophy and historical analysis will appeal not only to those interested in the polemics surrounding Spheres of justice but also to intelligent readers who are more concerned with getting the arguments right.

In this book, Michael Walzer revises and extends the arguments first put forth in his influential Spheres of Justice and frames his ideas about justice, social criticism, and national identity in light of the new political world that has arisen in the past decade.

Michael Walzer is the UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He is the author of The Company of Critics, Interpretation and Social Criticism, and Just and Unjust Wars, among other books

Contents

        Introduction ix

        One: Moral Minimalism 1

        Two: Distributive Justice as a Maximalist Morality 21

        Three: Maximalism and the Social Critic 41

        Four: Justice and Tribalism: Minimal Morality in International Politics 63

        Five: The Divided Self 85

        Acknowledgments 105

        Index 107

Introduction

My aim in this book is twofold: first, to rehearse, revise, and extend a set of arguments about justice, social criticism, and nationalist politics that I have been involved in making for some ten years. The revisions and extensions also represent so many responses to my critics (I am grateful to all of them). But I shall not engage in any polemics here; I want only to get the arguments right -- what that might mean is taken up in my third chapter -- not to gain some advantage in the critical wars. These are wars that can never in any case be won, since none of the participants are inclined, nor can they be forced, to surrender. There is no final arbiter, like the sovereign in Hobbes's Leviathan. So I shall strengthen my arguments as best I can and wait for further criticism. Nothing in these pages is finished or done with.

But I also want, second, to put my arguments to work in the new political world that has arisen since I first presented them. This new world is marked by the collapse of the totalitarian project -- and then by a pervasive, at least ostensible, commitment to democratic government and an equally pervasive, and more actual, commitment to cultural autonomy and national independence. A universal or near-universal ideology side-by-side with an extraordinarily intense pursuit of the "politics of difference": what are we to make of this? The two are not necessarily incompatible, though their simultaneous success is bound topluralize democracy in a radical way. It will produce a number of different "roads to democracy" and a variety of "democracies" at the end of the road – a prospect difficult to accept for those who believe that democracy is the single best form of government. And sometimes, at least, difference will triumph at the expense of democracy, generating political regimes more closely attuned to this or that historical culture: religious republics, liberal oligarchies, military chiefdoms, and so on. Nonetheless, I want to endorse the politics of difference and, at the same time, to describe and defend a certain sort of universalism. This won't be a universalism that requires democratic government in all times and places, but it opens the way for democracy wherever there are enough prospective and willing citizens. More important, perhaps, it prohibits the brutal repression of both minority and majority groups in democratic and non-democratic states. (I count myself among the willing citizens; I think it best to be governed democratically; but I don't claim that my political views have the definitive endorsement of God or Nature or History or Reason.)

Difference is, as it has always been, my major theme and abiding interest. But I mean to begin, in the first chapter, by describing what I take to be a universal moment -- not a philosophical but an actual moment -and the politics and morality it requires. I will then go on to restate my own particularist account of justice, in the second chapter, and of social criticism, in the third -always keeping in mind the memory of the universal moment. In the fourth chapter, I will try to show how the universalism of "self-determination," always congenial to difference, can also constrain it, setting limits to our particularist projects. And at the end, in the fifth chapter, I will provide a differentiated account of the self that will, I hope, render my defense of difference elsewhere more plausible and persuasive. When I wrote Spheres of Justice ten years ago, I argued (and I still believe) that we need focus only on things, the objects of distribution, to work out a critical account of distributive justice. The account does not require or "rest on" a theory of human nature. But there is a picture of the self, nothing so grand as a theory, that is consistent with "complex equality" as I described it there and with versions of complexity that I have defended elsewhere. So I will appeal, at the end, to the inner divisions of my readers -- assuming that these are not unlike my own -- and invite them to recognize themselves in the thick, particularist stories I want to tell about distributive justice, social criticism, and national identity.

I will describe in these chapters two different but interrelated kinds of moral argument -- a way of talking among ourselves, here at home, about the thickness of our own history and culture (including our democratic political culture) and a way of talking to people abroad, across different cultures, about the thinner life we have in common. "There is a thin man inside every fat man," George Orwell once wrote, "just as...there's a statue inside every block of stone." 1 Similarly, there are the makings of a thin and universalist morality inside every thick and particularist morality -- but the story of these two is not at all like the statue and the stone. They are differently formed and differently related, as we shall see.