| Columbia Encyclopedia: Michael Walzer |
| Works: Works by Michael Walzer |
| 1983 | Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Walzer advances a widely debated argument that all people are not created equal. Since not everyone possesses equal talent and intelligence, simple egalitarianism (keeping everyone as equal as possible) is not feasible. Instead, he argues that a "complex" equality must evolve to acknowledge individual differences. |
| Wikipedia: Michael Walzer |
| Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
|
|---|---|
| Full name | Michael Walzer |
| Born | March 3, 1935 |
| School/tradition | Analytic · Political Philosophy |
| Main interests | Human Rights · Ethics · Just War Theory · Liberalism · Communitarianism · Value pluralism · Social Criticism · Internationalism |
|
Influenced by
|
|
|
Influenced
|
|
Michael Walzer (3 March 1935) is a Jewish American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is 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.
Contents |
Michael 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 Just and Unjust Wars, 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.
Walzer is the older brother of historian Judith Walzer Leavitt.
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.
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.
Walzer taught a semester-long course with Robert Nozick in 1971 called "Capitalism and Socialism". The course was a debate between the two: Nozick's side is in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Walzer's side is in his Spheres of Justice, where he argues for "complex equality".[1]
In April 2008, Walzer received the prestigious Spinoza Lens, a bi-annual prize for ethics in The Netherlands. He has also been honoured with an emeritus professorship at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study.
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.[2]
For an analysis of communitarianism see: Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003]
| This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (July 2008) |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
| communitarianism | |
| Institute for Advanced Study (American history) | |
| Ethics of Bombing |
| Why do Michael do what he do? Read answer... | |
| Who is Michael Snow? Read answer... | |
| Who is michael bickmore? Read answer... |
Copyrights:
![]() | Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more | |
![]() | Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more | |
![]() | Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Michael Walzer". Read more |
Mentioned in