Michael Walzer’s Project of Restoring Religious Universality
What the prophet Amos knew about religious arrogance.
This piece was originally published on my Facebook to introduce a Hebrew-reading audience to a new publication I edited.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to read several books by Walzer. In the past year, I’ve written about him in passing—for instance, as the father of “Just War” theory, which returned somewhat to the headlines following the October 7th war. Beyond that, Walzer is considered in certain liberal circles as representing an attempt to revive liberalism. Among the purists who apparently enjoy wallowing in liberal theories that have been battered from every direction, the slow but steady drift toward critical theories from the left and communitarian theories from the right, Walzer represents to some extent “the last of the Mohicans.” He knows the classical liberal theories well, but they don’t convince him. He knows critical theories reasonably well, but he sees them as deeply politically problematic. Ultimately, it seems, he adopts a position that is fundamentally communitarian with a liberal qualification and the possibility for extensive social criticism.
This is essentially the position Walzer presents and defends with great skill in a book I edited in recent months, with the accompaniment and completion of Asaf Sagiv, which has now been published by Levin: Interpretation and Social Criticism (currently available at “Adraba” in Jerusalem). A position that in the hands of other speakers would appear as an incoherent hodgepodge receives in this book an unusually eloquent defense. Walzer’s virtue as an author is his extraordinary clarity and his ability to keep an eye on the big picture. This is such an exceptional quality that I’m fairly certain I can count on one hand the thinkers of our time who are capable of writing clearly, not getting lost in trivialities, maintaining a reasonable level of scholarship, and writing a scholarly book that addresses a general audience. In this sense, even if—like me—you don’t find yourselves ultimately persuaded by the fundamental positions Walzer seeks to advance, there is no doubt that the experience of reading him is instructive. At the very least, the average reader will find quite a few thought-provoking insights.
After this somewhat lengthy introduction, I wanted to write about a subject that, in my view, is more interesting than Walzer’s political philosophy or his philosophy of war. In addition to all these, over the years Walzer has tried to develop, with varying degrees of success, a religious philosophy that is at least interesting, and I think it often doesn’t receive enough attention relative to his other projects—despite the fact that, as always in theology, it allows for a somewhat more foundational view of the underlying motivations guiding Walzer in his work. Specifically, within his theological project there is an attempt to revive the biblical theology implied by the Book of Amos. This is true of his earlier book published in Hebrew by Shalem Press (Nationalism and Universalism), and it is also true of the summary of his current book, now translated by Yaniv Farkash for Levin Press.
In Nationalism and Universalism, Walzer presents his interpretation of the Book of Amos in order to respond to the moral critique of the pretensions of nineteenth-century liberal monotheism, which has since made deep inroads within Jewish and Christian orthodoxy. In contrast to classical liberal universalism, which presents a unified narrative and recipes of varying severity for political “enlightenment,” Walzer proposes there a reading of Chapter 9, verse 7:
To Me, O Israelites, you are Just like the Cushites —declares GOD. True, I brought Israel up From the land of Egypt, But also the Philistines from Caphtor And the Arameans from Kir.
As a rebuke to the Children of Israel for the arrogance they display, there and elsewhere in the Bible, as God’s only children. He qualifies the national story of the Exodus by noting that God redeemed the Philistines and Arameans in a different manner. According to Walzer, this is not an isolated slip; he goes on to note that the same rebuke can be found, for instance, in Isaiah 19:20–25:
They shall serve as a symbol and reminder of GOD of Hosts in the land of Egypt, so that when [the Egyptians] cry out to GOD against oppressors, a savior and champion will be sent to deliver them. For the Egyptians will be made to know GOD, and the Egyptians shall acknowledge GOD in that day, and they shall serve with sacrifice and oblation and shall make vows to GOD and fulfill them. GOD will first afflict and then heal the Egyptians: when they turn back, GOD will respond to their entreaties and heal them. In that day, there shall be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians shall join with the Egyptians and Egyptians with the Assyrians, and then the Egyptians together with the Assyrians shall serve [GOD]. In that day, Israel shall be a third partner with Egypt and Assyria as a blessing on earth; for GOD of Hosts will bless them, saying, “Blessed be My people Egypt, My handiwork Assyria, and My very own Israel.”
One God, many blessings, as he puts it. There is no single universal historical story here, but rather particular national existential dramas. The theological substance here belongs, in Walzer’s view, to the prophets’ hatred—and Amos’s in particular—of “oppression,” which Walzer translates into English as hatred of oppression of every kind. In Interpretation and Social Criticism, Walzer develops this critique a bit further and essentially sees Amos as the ideal figure of the social critic. A critic who, in his words, operates “from within,” who does not pretend to come from outside, but relies on national rhetoric and tradition to deliver criticism. As for international norms, these are perceived by Walzer as minimal in nature, and the critic can also rely on them to criticize international conflicts, since they are in essence a kind of “shared laws.”
What distinguishes Walzer’s critique, in my opinion, is actually its democratic character. Generally speaking, he finds fault with the tendency to think, for instance, that the Exodus is a kind of precedent-setting event—a minor redemption that heralds the great gospel that will come at the end of history—or alternatively, that every redemption in the world after the Exodus is a kind of participation in the original redemption of the Exodus. To illustrate Walzer’s critique in a somewhat different way than he does (but hopefully more sharply), I would say that what bothers him about national-theological chauvinism of the kind that Orthodox believers of all stripes tend to adopt is actually what political philosopher Margaret Canovan formulated in her book Populism (1981) when she came to criticize the tendency of supporters of “progress” to produce structural political inequality through the vanguard of the “progressives”:
On the one hand, it meant a call for the liberation of all men from the bonds of ignorance and superstition: the spreading of knowledge to all equally. But at the same time, precisely because knowledge continues to progress, enlightenment implied that some men must be in the vanguard of progress, and that the majority must lag behind. […] In the nature of things, if we are all progressing toward truth, some of us must be in front.
Criticism of this kind by Canovan, directed at the tendency of progressives to develop a sort of anti-democratic oligarchy, appears to be quite similar to the critique Walzer leveled against nineteenth-century liberal monotheism—a critique for which he also tried to provide a constructive response in two ways: both by clarifying the non-oligarchic role (or in the language of his latest book, non-colonialist) of the critic, and by establishing the foundation that still allows enough critical distance to be effective with respect to a given society. However, what Canovan helps us understand is that what actually drives this type of critique is a claim to elitist knowledge—in the case of nineteenth-century monotheism, moral knowledge of God’s universal commandments and metaphysical knowledge of the structure of a reality that contains one God of history. These are things to which Walzer devotes less attention, and that’s a pity, because they are actually more foundational to understanding the problem with this conception of monotheism.
In fact, as I wrote here previously in the series on “Monotheism and Enlightenment,” it seems to me that the problem with the conception of enlightenment lies elsewhere. First, because if we clear away for a moment the rhetoric and prejudices that the nineteenth century disseminated about monotheism, I think there is room to be much more critical toward the “accepted” monotheism among various believers. Second, the root of the problem lies, in my view, in metaphysics and consequently in the theology that accompanies it. Yes, nineteenth-century monotheism produces many chimeras, including political ones. But beyond that, it is a conception that is metaphysically mistaken, and consequently its influence on the ability of various believers to understand themselves in relation to their ancestral religion is distorting. The political problematic is ancillary to a mistaken understanding of knowledge as a kind of tool for advancing, or hastening, future redemption.
In this sense, Walzer’s project of reading the Bible in general, and of re-understanding (which of course has echoes in the tradition he knows and elaborates upon) the figure of “Amos” in particular, is blessed. But it is incomplete and may create the impression that the problem lies only in a “traditional option” that was forgotten in favor of another, or alternatively in a certain political problematic that arises as a result of these mistaken views. But this is not the case. The deep problem lies, as we have seen, in the metaphysical role that knowledge plays in its patronizing relationship to society, or to other peoples, in certain worldviews.