President George Bush said yes; some bishops said no; even Doonesbury touched on the question. But what does it mean, in any case, to say that a war is just? What are the yardsticks of justice that support President Bush's claim that it was just to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait? And how does one evaluate the justness of stopping the war when the allies did? And what of our fierce bombing of the fleeing Iraqi troops on the road from Kuwait? The threat to Israel? The value of oil in weighing whether to fight or not? But Was It Just? is an ethical primer in which the leading thinkers of our...

A thought-provoking reflection on why secular national liberation movements are so often challenged by militant religious revivals

Many of the successful campaigns for national liberation in the years following World War II were initially based on democratic and secular ideals. Once established, however, the newly independent nations had to deal with entirely unexpected religious fierceness. Michael Walzer, one of America's foremost political thinkers, examines this perplexing trend by studying India, Israel, and Algeria, three nations whose founding principles and...

With a new preface by Michael Walzer

Jean-Paul Sartre's book is a brilliant portrait of both anti-Semite and Jew, written by a non-Jew and from a non-Jewish point of view. Nothing of the anti-Semite either in his subtle form as a snob, or in his crude form as a gangster, escapes Sartre's sharp eye, and the whole problem of the Jew's relationship to the Gentile is examined in a concrete and living way, rather than in terms of sociological abstractions.

Michael Walzer is one of the world's most eminent philosophers on the subject of war and ethics. Now, for the first time since his classic Just and Unjust Wars was published almost three decades ago, this volume brings together his most provocative arguments about contemporary military conflicts and the ethical issues they raise. The essays in the book are divided into three sections. The first deals with issues such as humanitarian intervention, emergency ethics, and terrorism. The second consists of Walzer's responses to particular wars, including the first Gulf War, Kosovo,...

The question of the responsibility inherent in the unrivaled might of the U.S. military is one that continues to take up headlines across the globe. This award-winning group of reporters and scholars, including, among others, David Rieff, Peter Maass, Philip Gourevitch, William Shawcross, George Packer, Bill Berkeley and Samantha Power revisit four of the worst instances of state-sponsored killing--Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor--in the last half of the twentieth century in order to reconsider the success and failure of U.S. and U.N. military and humanitarian...

The Company of Critics provides a fascinating survey of the terrain of social criticism in the last century. Organizing the book as a series of eleven intellectual biographies, Michael Walzer tells not just the dramatic story of the cultural and political radical but also the more personal story of the meaning of criticism to the critic. By looking at the life and work of Julien Benda, Randolph Bourne, Martin Buber, Antonio Gramsci, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Breyten Breytenbach, Walzer explains the role of the public...

How a nation commits itself to freedom has long been at the heart of debates about foreign aid, economic sanctions and military intervention. Moral and faith traditions have much to say about what is required to achieve this end. And after September 11, no one can doubt the importance of religious beliefs in influencing relations among peoples and nations. to fanaticism, or do they encourage a new realism about the forces shaping the choices confronting the US? The contributors to this volume come at the issue from very different perspectives and offer exceptional and unexpected insights on a...

In this book, Michael Walzer revises and extends the arguments first put forth in his influential Spheres of Justice and frames his ideas about justice, social criticism, and national identity in light of the new political world that has arisen in the past decade.

Just and Unjust Wars forever changed the way we think about the ethics of conflict. First published in 1977 and now brought up to the present with a new preface and postscript, this classic work by political philosopher Michael Walzer examines the moral issues that arise before, during, and after the wars we fight. Reaching from the Athenian attack on Melos, to the Mai Lai massacre, to Afghanistan and beyond, Walzer mines historical accounts and the testimony of participants, decision makers, and victims to explain when war is justified and what ethical limitations apply to those who...