Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad Michael Walzer, NEW

Description: In his book Michael Walzer revises and extends the arguments first put forth in the influential Spheres of Justice and frames his ideas about jus-tice, social criticism, and national identity in light of the new political world that has arisen in the past decade."[This] is a moving, eloquent, and at times inspiring meditation on the problem of obligation... Walzer writes on some of the most explosive issues of the day in a voice that is always calm and thoughtful. Our culture is thicker because of his presence."— Commonweal"Thick and Thin is extremely readable, engaging and perceptive, ambitiously drawing into a unified framework a variety of difficult moral and political issues."— Times Literary Supplement... a well-argued... set of carefully wrought ideas on the state of public moral debate.— Kirkus ReviewsMichael Walzer is the UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Company of Critics, Interpretation and Social Criti-cism, and Just and Unjust Wars. My aim in this book is twofold: first, to rehearse, revise, and extend a set of arguments about justice, social criti-cism, 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 (1 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 differ-ence": what are we to make of this? The two are not necessarily incompatible, though their simultaneous success is bound to pluralize democracy in a radical way. ONE: Moral MinimalismI want to begin my argument by recalling a picture (I have in mind a film clip from the television news, late in that wonderful year 1989), which is the actual starting point, the conceptual occasion, of this chapter. It is a picture of people manch say the sty Trut Prand the austens,When I saw the picture, I knew immediately what the signs meant—and so did everyone else who saw the same picture. Not only that: I also recognized and acknowledged the values that the marchers were defending-and so did (almost) everyone else. Is there any recent account, any post-modernist account, of political language that can explain this understanding and acknowledgment? How could I penetrate so quickly and join so unreservedly in the language game or the power play of a distant demonstration?The marchers shared a culture with which I was largely un-familiar; they were responding to an experience I had never had. And yet, I could have walked comfortably in their midst. I could carry the same signs.The reasons for this easy friendliness and agreement probably have as much to do with what the marchers did not mean as with what they did mean. They were not marching in defense of the coherence theory, or the consensus theory, or the correspondence theory of truth.Perhaps they disagreed about such theories among themselves; more likely, they did not care about them.No particular account of truth was at issue here. ORDER BEFORE 2 PM CENTRAL - SAME DAY SHIPPINGEB246

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