Thick and Thin

Moral Argument at Home and Abroad

Michael Walzer

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268161644
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Michael Walzer revises and extends the arguments in his influential 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 three decades. Walzer focuses on two different but interrelated kinds of moral argument: maximalist and minimalist, thick and thin, local and universal. This new edition has a new preface and afterword, written by the author, describing how the reasoning of the book connects with arguments he made in Just and Unjust Wars about the morality of warfare.

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 and Just and Unjust Wars but also to intelligent readers who are more concerned with getting the arguments right.

THREE: Maximalism and The Social Critic

I

I have written two books on social criticism, and I am not sure that I have much left to say.²⁶ But I will try here to describe, more explicitly than I have yet done, how criticism works from within a particularist and therefore maximalist theory of distributive justice. For it has been a common reproach to Spheres of Justice—to the argument that distributive standards are internal to a culture—that it precludes serious or radical social criticism. This is a worrisome matter: for my purpose in writing the book, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Othello, was nothing if not critical.²⁷

The best way to begin is to suggest the natural or, at least, the most obvious form of internal or “immanent” criticism. I think that this is also the most common form of criticism generally, not only of institutions and practices but also of individual behavior. It’s not my purpose here to address the question of individuals, but it is worth noting the extent to which social criticism works from what might be called the private or personal analogy. We often criticize friends and colleagues for not living up to a set of standards that we and they profess to honor. We measure them against their own pretended ideals; we charge them with hypocrisy or bad faith. A critic who holds up a mirror to society as a whole is engaged in a similar enterprise. He means to show us as we really are, and what gives this demonstration its moral force, what makes the mirror a critical instrument inspiring dismay and guilt, is a pervasive and profound social idealism. Individuals need to maintain a high opinion of themselves, a sense of their probity and righteousness; and similarly the members of any society (especially the leading members) need to believe that their distributive arrangements and policies are just. Hence the lies they tell, not only to others but also to themselves, their everyday evasions, and the veil they draw over the more ugly features of the world they have made. The critic tears aside the veil.

The need for self-justification has, no doubt, a number of reasons; we can give both cynical and sympathetic accounts of it. Why did the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, for example, or the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, in the earliest inscriptions, proclaim their commitment to seeing justice done, the poor sustained, widows and orphans protected?²⁸ Was it because they thought that their power would be more secure if their subjects believed in the commitment? Or because their own self-esteem depended on thinking themselves committed? Or because the rituals of commitment (and then the inscriptions) were required by the gods? Or because this was what the rulers of states had always said about themselves? (But why had they said it?) It doesn’t matter. If the pharaoh promises that he will see justice done, then the way is open for some Egyptian scribe to take his courage in his hands and write out a catalogue of all the injustices the pharaoh in fact condones.

But this kind of criticism, though brave enough, is limited by the reigning or conventional ideals. What if the scribe wants to criticize the conventions? It’s not likely that he means to deny that justice ought to be done. Perhaps he has some new vision of what justice entails. If the new vision is to be persuasive, however, it will have to be connected by argument to the old one. Sustaining the poor with royal charity, the scribe might say, brings no end to poverty; what is needed instead is an agrarian law, a division of the land. (It will matter, of course, how the land is understood. Is it a gift of the gods? To whom? For what purpose?) Or perhaps the scribe believes that this pharaoh, or pharaohs generally, will never live up to the conventional commitments: what is needed is priestly or, even better, scribal rule. I don’t know of any Egyptian scribes who made arguments of this sort; I only want to insist that they are possible arguments. They start from the existing social idealism and claim that the ideals are hypocritically held, or ineffectively enforced by the powers that be, or inadequate in their own terms.

Consider a better known, more extensively documented, example: the critique of hierarchy in medieval and early modern Europe. Here there was (what probably also existed in the ancient world) a complex and internally divided ideological system. I will mark off, schematically, only two forms of justification: religious and secular, Christian and feudal. Hierarchy had, of course, its religious defense and its clerical defenders, but Christianity was also always at least potentially subversive, its biblical texts suggesting a kind of primitive or original egalitarianism:

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

But I want to focus here on feudal ideology, hierarchical from start to finish, though not without its own critical potential. For it was the claim of the gentlemen, lords, and barons who occupied each hierarchical rank, that they served the ranks below. Service was the social ideal of the feudal system; its founding myth was a tale of the strong defending the weak.²⁹ The usual crowd of scribes, lay or clerical, provided the usual mapping out of the ideal in terms of justice done and protection provided. And when justice was not done and protection not provided, an occasional critic appeared to castigate a dissolute and degenerate aristocracy.

But criticism of this sort, it might be said again, in fact upholds the system, for it is addressed only to deviant individuals or groups. The bad aristocrats are castigated, while aristocracy itself is celebrated and the ideal of service reaffirmed. So they are; but the celebration is subversive insofar as the aristocratic ideal is distinguished from every actual instance of aristocratic behavior. Soon some bolder critic will ask why it is that these lordly and privileged men so rarely perform the services that supposedly justify their position. The revolutionary critique of artistocrats as parasites has its origin here: they have work to do but don’t do it!³⁰

Hierarchy is a distributive system in which place, standing, and role are thickly intertwined—in discourse, not necessarily in practice. Or, perhaps, necessarily not in practice, for pride of place undercuts the willingness to serve. Aristocrats find other roles—leisure, display, wit, intrigue—with far less cultural legitimacy. Thus the bold lines of Beaumarchais’ Figaro: “Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born—nothing more!”³¹ A helpful or protective lord or baron is now seen as a contradiction in terms (much like a benevolent despot—the adjective is readily deployed against the noun). And then there is no way to justify hierarchical standing. The whole structure collapses. I would suggest that the egalitarian doctrine of “the rights of man” was the product of, or was made possible by, this collapse. The feudal fortress was not stormed from without until it had been undermined from within. Or, to shift the metaphor, equality grows out of the critique of a failed hierarchy.³²

Something similar could be said, I think, about the example with which I began my first chapter. How did the Czechs, and other East European dissidents, go about criticizing communism? Here too there existed a complex ideological culture, and it seems likely that a certain kind of criticism, and with it an elaborate pattern of evasion and resistance, was sustained from the beginning in religious and nationalist terms. This was mostly a submerged and clandestine critique, however, expressed only in private, to family and friends. It would be worth investigating in detail how criticism of this kind actually works under conditions of tyrannical repression; the crucial point, however, is that it does work. It even affects the distribution of such social goods as it can still (at least partially) control—recognition and honor, for example. But the most dangerous criticism, which tyrants fear more than any other, is the criticism shaped not by old loyalties and ideologies but by their own putative idealism. The primary critics of communism, who opened the way for nationalists and Christians, were dissident communists, demanding that the tyrants actually deliver on the values to which they claimed to be committed (and to which their critics were really committed): freedom, equality, and democratic government.

The critique of communist tyranny no doubt also reflected a reiterated minimalism—hence our own instant solidarity with it. But this solidarity had its limits, for the full program of the earliest dissidents was a communist, even a Leninist, program that could not have been endorsed by many of their Western sympathizers.³³ Indeed, the full program lost much of its relevance, even for its Eastern sympathizers, as soon as the communist regimes collapsed, so much was it, if not a function of the regimes themselves, a product of the movements and ideology out of which the regimes had come. By that time, however, many of the dissidents had revised their critique, introducing new distinctions into the social idealism of the left. They came to believe that a state committed, even hypocritically, to simple equality and radical redistribution was necessarily too powerful, a threat to every other aspect of its own (putative) idealism, beyond reform. They became critics of Leninism as well as of Stalinism (and all the local imitations of Stalinism), and so drew closer to what we can think of as the standard maximalist morality of the West: liberalism, democracy, “bourgeois civil rights.” But it was the experience of internal dissidence, and the recognition of the extreme unlikelihood of reform from within, that led the critics to adopt this external model. Though the time span is much shorter, as befits the rhythms of modernity, the case is the same in the contemporary East as in the late medieval and early modern West. Liberalism grew out of the critique of a failed communism.

I have used these examples to suggest the radical potential of an internal critique: the subversiveness of immanence. Social criticism in maximalist terms can call into question, can even overturn, the moral maximum itself, by exposing its internal tensions and contradictions. And this seems to me the normal course of criticism even when the critics don’t mean to run the full length of the course, aiming at reform or reconstruction, say, rather than at subversion. Social critics commonly start from where they stand, win or lose on their own ground.

II

But how—so the critic of Spheres of Justice commonly continues—can this original, normal, internal criticism ever find persuasive expression?³⁴ I think that this question has a very particular point: what is being asked is how internal criticism can ever find a definitive philosophical expression. For the claims that the dissidents make about communist freedom and equality (or the claims they make about feudal service and protection) are always disputed. And there are alternative accounts of vanguard tyranny (and aristocratic privilege): more or less credible stories that can also be given a historical dimension and rooted in old texts. So the internal criticism, as long as it is confined to the interpretation of communism (or feudalism) as a maximalist morality, always falls short—not only as a practical but even as a theoretical endeavor. People who live inside the moral/cultural thickness of the old regime, who read these books, obey (or evade) these laws, celebrate this tradition, and so on, nonetheless disagree about what it all “means.” The result is an intellectual as well as a political stalemate. And then the only thing to do, at the end, after all the possibilities of interpretive criticism have been exhausted—so say the critics of immanence—is to appeal to an external standard: the best abstract and general theory that deals with the matters in dispute.

Of course, if one really were in secure possession of the best abstract and general theory, one probably wouldn’t bother with internal criticism at all. All the local critics could be replaced by a universal Office of Social Criticism, where an internationally recruited and specially trained civil service (of professional philosophers? political theorists? theologians?) applied the same moral principles to every country, culture, and religious community in the world. I would not be surprised if the medieval Church and the old Comintern had such offices, under different names. And there may well be organizations aspiring to this status today, attached to the United Nations or independently constituted. But if the aim here is maximalist in character—to render a detailed judgment of moral values and social practices everywhere—then theoretical possession is as likely as interpretive understanding to be disputed. The leap from inside to outside, from the particular to the general, from immanence to transcendence, changes the terrain of the argument, but I know of no evidence that the argument marches more readily toward closure on its new terrain. Even people who read the same books (of moral philosophy, say) are likely to disagree about which abstract and general theory is really the best.

It is still possible, as I argued in the first chapter, to move effectively from the particular to the general—as when a group of critics give up their own maximalism and embrace (or invent) for some specific purpose a moral minimum. This is, I think, the approach of groups like Amnesty International, which can certainly play a useful critical role—so long as they restrain whatever impulse their members have to impose a complete set of moral principles across the range of cultural difference. Success depends upon this self-restraint, for otherwise Amnesty International would represent one more missionizing maximalism, like the Church and the Comintern. Its members would make themselves into a kind of global vanguard, aspiring, perhaps, to rule outside their sphere, claiming political authority everywhere on the basis of ideological correctness. If, however, there is (as I believe) no single, correct, maximalist ideology, then most of the disputes, and certainly most of the distributive disputes, that arise within a particular society and culture have to be settled—there is no choice—from within. Not without suggestions from the outside, not without reference to other maximal moralities, but by and large through the kind of interpretive arguments that I described in my last chapter and through political processes adjusted to them. Social critics mostly work out of a Home Office.

All this is not to say that moral maximalism can’t be “theorized”—first of all in a general way and then more particularly. We can explain its general value and the deference we owe to each of its particular versions (and the limits of that deference). And then we can try to specify its content in some particular case and for some particular purpose, giving a theoretical account of local justice, for example, displaying the interconnections of its various parts and defending a view of its priorities. To construct a theory out of an actual thick morality is mostly an interpretive (rather than a philosophically creative) task. If the purpose is critical, then what is required is a pointed interpretation, a localized theory that concludes with a moral maxim—the philosophical equivalent of an Aesopian fable. Indeed, it is a good thing if the interpreter is able to tell a story, making his critical argument from within a tradition, acknowledging the significance of historical events and proper names even as he reaches for the appropriate theoretical terms.

III

But doesn’t this account (I am still following in the tracks of my critics) miss the excitement and heroism of the critical enterprise?³⁵ My imaginary Egyptian scribe takes his life in his hands; the early Czech dissidents put their careers and their own and their family’s safety on the line. How could they do this unless they were sure that they had gotten things right—not only that their interpretation of the maximalist morality was the one true interpretation but also that this maximalist morality was the one true morality? I have been talking about a thin universalism and a thick particularism, but isn’t criticism at its most powerful when it claims to be both thick and universal, rich in its detail, expansive in its scope—a full philosophical account of the right and the good? Think of Martin Luther as a critic of the Church: his critique was certainly based on an interpretation of Christian maximalism about which he had no doubts (it wasn’t just one possible interpretation). And the argument had universal reach: everyone should be or become a Christian of the Lutheran sort. If Luther had not believed this, could he have been so strong, so confident of where he stood and what he could and could not do?

I am sure that Luther was a strong man and a great critic, but he was also brutal and intolerant—in part, at least, because of his Christian universalism. Nor is he the only model of the critic as hero; it would not be difficult to describe alternative models, critical styles more skeptical or more modest (as I have done, in fact, in The Company of Critics). But I want to attempt a different argument here; I want to deny that the critical enterprise is best understood with reference to its heroic moments. A recent and very fine book by two French scholars, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Théve...