The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’.
– Michael Walzer, NBN interview (2023)
In the 1990 collection What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings edited by Solomon and Murphy and published by Oxford, teachers had a textbook to help introduce students to a broad cross-section of political thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel to Hayek to Mill, Nozick, Rawls, Sandel, Taylor and Walzer among others. It is worth mentioning because Michael Walzer insists he is not a formal philosopher, does not in fact, deserve to be grouped with the likes of a Dewey or a Hegel, as Richard Rorty had done in the introduction of his 1999 collection of essays in Philosophy and Social Hope:
‘Recently Michael Walzer, a political philosopher best known for his earlier work, Spheres of Justice, has come to Hegel’s and Dewey’s defense. In his more recent book Thick and Thin, Walzer argues that we should not think of the customs and institutions of particular societies as accidental accretions around a common core of universal moral rationality, the transcultural moral law. Rather, we should think of the thick set of customs and institutions as prior, and as what commands moral allegiance.’
Rorty’s broader point remains as relevant as arguably, the positions of the political philosophers as collected in the Solomon and Murphy reader mentioned above, What is Justice?, which also recognized the appeal of Walzer’s ‘very different approach’ to the Rawls’ paradigmatic A Theory of Justice. That same collection also shares Nozick’s critical response to Rawls - mentioned because of the well-known course, ‘Capitalism and Socialism’, that Robert Nozick and Michael Walzer taught together at Harvard.
A former student, the Washington Post columnist, Brookings senior fellow, and policy professor E.J. Dionne once said: it was one of the best courses he ever took, adding, it was Michael Walzer ‘who very much shaped my view’.
A short list of Professor Walzer’s book titles include Just and Unjust Wars, Spheres of Justice - A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, The Company of Critics, Thick and Thin - Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, On Toleration, Politics and Passion, The Jewish Political Tradition, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, A Foreign Policy for the Left, as well as a published conversation - Justice is Steady Work: A Conversation on Political Theory - published by Polity in 2020.
This interview focuses primarily on his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective (2023, Yale University Press) which does much to clarify a simple, yet crucial distinction, between liberal and illiberal sensibilities underlying the pluralism, populism, and polarization today.
Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.
Keith Krueger can be reached at keithNBn@gmail.com
Today, we’re focusing on two major money events impacting the economy and possibly your own bank account: The seemingly sudden failure of some U.S. banks, and stubbornly high inflation.
We’ll get into inflation in the second half of this episode with the expert best known as the Inflation Guy. Michael Ashton is the managing principal of Enduring Investments and the host of the “Inflation Guy” podcast. We’ll discuss what triggers inflation, why prices don’t typically come back down after they go up, and so much more.
But first, the story getting all the headlines over the past week: major bank failures on a scale not seen since the Great Recession. We wanted to take more time to explain how this all happened and what can be learned from it. We’re speaking with Justin Baer, a senior special writer at the Wall Street Journal who has been covering the collapse.
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On the "CBS News Weekend Roundup," host Allison Keyes gets the latest on the banks crises from CBS News Business Analyst Jill Schlesinger. We'll hear about a huge challenge to abortion rights amid a case that seeks to remove a widely used abortion pill from the U-S market.
In the "Kaleidoscope with Allison Keyes" segment, a discussion with CBS Saturday Morning co-host Michelle Miller about her new book, "Belonging: A Daughter's Search for Identity Through Love and Loss."
John Dickerson talks with author Chris Miller about his new book, Chip War: The Fight for The World’s Most Critical Technology.They discuss how semiconductor chips became so important, why everyone is so dependent on Taiwan for chips, and what lessons China can glean from what’s happening in Ukraine.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
When you imagine how science and technology will reshape our future, does it excite you, or scare you, or both? Each month, the Future Tense Fiction podcast will introduce you to a short work of science fiction, one that will challenge, surprise and intrigue you. Then host Maddie Stone will talk with the author to explore how their own experiences with technology—from smart weapons, to electronic pets, to virtual reality—informed their writing and their vision.
That’s every month on Future Tense Fiction, a podcast from Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. See you in the future.
After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent jitters through the financial system, Duncan Weldon explains how it?s just the latest in the long history of bank runs.
He talks to financial analyst and former banking regulator Dan Davies - author of ?Lying for Money? - to understand how bank runs happen, and what the repercussions of this very modern bank run might be for the global financial system.
Presenter: Duncan Weldon
Producer: Nathan Gower
Editor: Richard Vadon
Programme Coordinators: Helena Warwick-Cross
Sound Engineer: Neva Missirian
Our friends at NPR's TED Radio Hour podcast have been pondering some BIG things — specifically, the connection between our physical, mental, and spiritual health. In this special excerpt, what if you could control a device, not with your hand, but with your mind? Host Manoush Zomorodi talks to physician and entrepreneur Tom Oxley about the implantable brain-computer interface that can change the way we think.
Keep an eye on NPR's TED Radio Hour podcast feed the next few weeks, as they unveil the series.
