While rereading Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice as part of my ongoing project to study the various serious, anti-libertarian arguments, I was reminded of the following essay I wrote years ago. Long gone from the Internet, I though it would be fun for it to return. It’s not perfect, and could be made stronger with a discussion of some of the unfounded assumptions of Walzer’s communitarianism, but I’m surprised at how well the piece has held up.

A Marble Temple Shining on a Hill: Reality and Michael Walzer

The world to which [philosophy] introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.  In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

-William James, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

Lie Tolerated For Its Beauty

-Headline, The Onion, November 3, 2005

Introduction

Michael Walzer has no idea what he’s talking about.  In the preface to his communitarian manifesto, Spheres of Justice, he tells us that he isn’t writing from “any great distance from the social world in which I live.”  Instead, he will try “to work my argument through contemporary and historical examples, accounts of distributions in our own society and, by way of contrast, in a range of others.”  He intends to “stand in the cave, in the city, on the ground.” That is, the world in which you and I reside.

After an examination of Spheres of Justice, it becomes clear that, for Walzer, the cave is just large enough to contain the safe and reasonable halls of Princeton, and the positions he advances are illuminated only by the pleasant light of the philosophy wing of the ivory tower.  In short, Walzer’s communitarianism is not so much about the world in which politics actually happens so much as it is about the sort of world where Walzer wishes it did.  Says the political scientist Daniel Drezner, “Too often, theorists come up with great models of the world by assuming away petty inconveniences.” This essay is about what Walzer finds inconvenient. Continue reading →