I’ve been reading (and teaching) Michael Walzer for well over 50 years, and so was delighted to find that he has a recent book, The Struggle for A Decent Society: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective. I have found it to be his most engaging, provocative, and enlightening work yet (and perhaps ever, as he hints this will be his last).  Walzer tells us that it was written during the pandemic when he was isolated at home and thus lacked access to his office where he kept the many books he has studied or written and the many lecture notes he had produced.   Thus he depends on memories and reflections to produce a book that reads more like a memoir than another study addressing a particular academic and/or political issue. Here he reveals the astonishing breadth and depth of his knowledge and understanding of political thought as he returns to his broad concerns about democracy, socialism, nationalism, communitarianism, feminism, Judaism, and intellectualism.   

Our broader commitments to liberalism, he says, do (and should) shape our conceptions, justifications, and criticisms of these public philosophies and occupations.  Like John Rawls and William Connelly, he argues that people need multiple public philosophies to guide their thinking on each of these concerns, but having shared commitments to liberalism must come first.  Decades ago, Connelly argued that our most general commitment must be to pluralism. Rawls proposed he need and have an overlapping consensus among most of the informed public on such matters as (moral, social, and political) pluralism and its central values of tolerance of differences, equal rights, aiding the oppressed and disadvantaged, etc.

In my previous readings of Walzer, I had interpreted him to be more a pluralist than a liberal (which might have been misguided, as his discussion of an overlapping consensus is developed in his Political Liberalism).   In any event, he now suggests that our consensual commitments to pluralism are just part of our broader and more enduring commitments to liberalism.  He argues that liberalism is less a particular ideology or public philosophy than a set of constraints that shape and limit our other concerns.   Given the MAGA appeals being made by current Republicans and Donald Trump, the most relevant discussion here concerns nationalism.  He suggests that – compared to pluralism – liberalism with its insistence on constitutionalism, the rule of law, judicial independence, and electoral control of political authorities provides better guidance about what those in a liberal society like America will (and should) find beneficial in liberal nationalism and what is (and should be) problematic about nationalist values unconstrainted by liberal commitments.