Michael Walzer on War and Justice by Brian Orend (review)

HUMANITIES 365 may be fairly said that the contradictions of his life and persona make him difficult to understand. Indeed, his writing shows a man in the process of working towards self-understanding but never entirely achieving it. Before we can chastise others for misunderstanding Nowlan, we must ask ourselves whether he understood himself. Then again, maybe it is Nowlan=s self-doubt and his unending quest for understanding that gives his writing its enduring appeal. (PAUL MILTON) Brian Orend. Michael Walzer on War and Justice McGill-Queen=s University Press. ix, 226. $75.00 In this lucid and well-organized little book, Brian Orend discusses the work of one of America=s foremost public intellectuals, Michael Walzer. Walzer has had two careers in political theory: writings of the 1970s, such as Just and Unjust Wars (1977), addressed the question of such wars in the field of international relations, whereas questions of distributive justice, democracy, and community, explored in particular in Spheres of Justice (1983), were Walzer=s main concern in the 1980s and 1990s. Audiences for, and interpretation of, Walzer=s work have tended to divide neatly into those drawn to one set of questions or the other. As a result, there has been little sense of how Walzer=s arguments in the two domains mesh or hang together. Orend seeks to correct this by considering whether Walzer >offers us an overarching theory of justice, one which can unite these two topics and put them in their proper perspective.= The book proceeds in reverse chronological order, beginning with the latter part of Walzer=s corpus, then proceeding to concentrate on the early writings, clearly of the greatest interest to Orend. Only the first two chapters of the book consider distributive justice, whereas the five remaining chapters deal with the scholarship in international relations. The book consults almost none of the secondary literature on Walzer=s writings on justice. Indeed, Orend seems to forget the book=s original aim when he contends in the conclusion that Walzer=s just war theory is the work=s >main focus.= As a result, the book ends up reinforcing the problem Orend sought to redress: the lack of interest one part of Walzer=s work seems to have for interpreters of the other. Orend does succeed in making some thoughtful connections between the local and global perspectives, but he is handicapped by a lack of grounding in the former, evident in such lame remarks as >for my money, Walzer makes the most plausible and sustained case in favour of conventionalism on offer in political theory.= It is also something of a missed opportunity because Orend has some interesting points to make about Walzer=s culture-relative theory of justice that would have been usefully developed further. The lopsidedness in research is peculiar in a book that sets itself a 366 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 modest task of careful scholarship rather than grand theorizing. Indeed, it seems a weakness that the book is not more ambitious, since an argument that took Walzer as a point of departure rather than a constant reference would have made for a more important and relevant study. Further, it is unclear how worthwhile a painstaking study of Walzer is in the current milieu. Walzer=s work on justice is innovative and powerful, and it has had some influence for its thesis that inequality in one sphere should not convert into inequality in another (e.g., wealth should not buy power). But Walzer was heavily criticized for his surprisingly moderate egalitarian aims, born of a refusal to offer criteria that might transcend particular communities or cultures. Nearly twenty years after Spheres of Justice was penned, there are not many Walzerians in political theory circles. Worse still are the fortunes of Walzer=s just war theory, which was developed in light of the Second World War and Vietnam. Today=s problems of postSoviet ethnic conflict and the challenges of globalization have made for a different empirical context that has changed the face of scholarship in international relations and which Walzer=s work, only modestly revised, does little to address. Orend hard-headedly addresses these latter difficulties, probing the distinctions that Walzer draws...