Abstract
This Festschrift to Michael Walzer is, to the best of my knowledge, the first critical collection dedicated to his work. This may be surprising – as Naomi Sussmann's helpful introduction demonstrates, and pace Walzer's self-effacing claim that he has ‘generally been marginal to academic debates’ (p. 167), his contribution to these debates in the last 50 years has been remarkable. Given this lacuna, a collection of new articles from leading scholars revisiting Walzer's writings is more than welcome.
Each of the book's four sections deals with a broad theme, followed by an extensive response from Walzer himself. In the first section, which is both the most consistent in quality and most coherent in theme, Walzer's classic ‘The Moral Standing of States’ is the target of articles by David Miller, Ruth Gavison, Charles Beitz and Michael Doyle. In the second section, Jacob Levy and Will Kymlicka critique Walzer's version of multiculturalism, while Bonnie Honig's interesting contribution discusses his turn to the Jewish scriptures in Exodus and Revolution. In the third section, Michael Sandel and Tim Scanlon offer opposing views of his account of justice, while George Kateb's scathing critique challenges Walzer's work as a whole. Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to Walzer's groundbreaking version of just war theory, with contributions from Jeff McMahan, Yitzhak Benbaji, David Luban and Nancy Sherman.
While some of the arguments presented in this book will seem familiar to those who followed Walzer and his critics over the years, most offer an original and fresh perspective. In addition, Walzer's responses often highlight interesting connections between different contributions – such as Miller's and Levy's separate arguments that Walzer's multiculturalism undercuts his other theoretical commitments – namely, shared understandings of distributive justice and state sovereignty, respectively.
The book is not without flaws. The contributions vary in quality, and at times the attempt to group different articles in a section under a unifying theme seems forced, and Honig's and Kateb's contributions seem to me especially out of place. It would also have been interesting to read some reference to Walzer's contribution to realist political theory – e.g. his theory of the problem of dirty hands in politics, which is all too often eclipsed by his contributions to international relations theory. These relatively minor points do not detract from the value of this book, which will be useful to those familiar with Walzer's thought as much as to those new to it.