The Unfinished Bargain

Michael Walzer in Conversation with Justin Fowler

Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, Manhattan, New York, NY.

Historic American Engineering Record. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

In the field of political theory, the demands of the academy are not easily reconciled with the responsibilities of active political engagement. Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, has negotiated this dual mandate for the better part of six decades. Having recently stepped down as an editor of Dissent magazine, a position he held for over twenty years, Walzer continues to prod our most basic assumptions about the nature of citizenship, the forms of our political arenas, and the social imaginary which motivates disputes over the character of the good life. An advocate for the defense of political frameworks which enable social expression, Walzer has written extensively on the necessity of protecting the physical and conceptual spaces that foster both communal association and political conflict. In Walzer’s writings, America appears as a promising, yet unfinished experiment constituted through its inhabitants’ shared belief in the potential of political form as a guarantor of some measure of equity. Defining the measure itself, however, remains up for dispute. At the core of Walzer’s thought is an insistence that politics does not occur within an ideal space. Instead, the disinterested abastractions of political philosophy give way to practices of bargaining, where hopes, passions, objects, spaces, and rituals take their place alongside reasoned analysis. Such a formulation directly implicates the material of the built environment in the shaping of political performance and its reception.

Justin Fowler: As the subject of our inaugural issue is “Looking Inward,” I wanted to ask how you’re currently occupied with the history of the American political condition?

Michael Walzer: I’m now finishing a book called, What Happened to National Liberation? It’s a comparison of India, Israel, and Algeria, countries where there were three left-wing secular national liberation movements: in India and Israel immediately after the Second World War, and in Algeria fifteen years later. In each case these secular movements succeeded in establishing states which were challenged roughly twenty-five years later by militant politicized religious revivals—three different religions, but the same timetable. I’m asking what happened and why did it happen? Why is the cultural reproduction of the secular left in trouble in these three places (and in other places)? I gave a set of lectures at Yale last spring on this subject, and half the questions weren’t about India, Algeria, or Israel, they were about the United States. This was because the U.S. had a national liberation movement that was secular and that was followed some twenty years later by the Second Great Awakening; same time schedule, and a fourth religion. But that religious revival did not challenge the secularism of the new Republic. In effect, I was invited by these Yale questioners to become an American exceptionalist and to explain why the U.S. experience was different. It encouraged me to include a postscript in the book on the United States. I’d never really spent a lot of time on the early American Republic. When I wrote about the Puritanism in my dissertation, it was English Puritanism. I’m actually surprised by the militancy of secularists in this country. Some people say the U.S. never had a secular left, but we did, very early on. I have a favorite story about that, which I find amazing. In the early American Republic well into the 1840s, the U.S. Post Office delivered mail all seven days of the week because the state could not recognize a religious day of rest. And in 1829 there was actually a debate in the Senate about this and they appointed a committee which was chaired by an Evangelical Baptist Senator from Kentucky. The committee delivered a report arguing the service must continue to deliver mail on a Sunday; to not do so would invade the jurisdiction of Jesus Christ, as the secular state had no business recognizing Sunday. And this Senator, Richard Johnson, became Vice President under Martin Van Buren. These were Jacksonian Democrats debating this issue. I’m trying to figure out what was different in this case from the others I study. Obviously, Protestantism is different from Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. The secularists in the three countries I address in my book had to fight against the religious commitments of their fellow citizens, while the secularists here didn’t have to do that because established religions had more or less been left behind. But I also think one of the really big differences is the earliness of the American Revolution and the fact that the woman question wasn’t an issue. Gender equality is the biggest challenge to the religious movements in the three countries in my study. A lot of the energy of the religious revival comes from a campaign against such equality. But it just wasn’t an issue in America in the late eighteenth century. I suspect a lot of the liberal Protestants at that time would not have been so liberal on this issue.

Congress of Racial Equality conducts march in memory of Negro youngsters killed in Birmingham bombings, All Souls Church, 16th Street, Washington, D.C.

Photo by Thomas O'Halloran, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

“The belief that power—even of a President who has won forty out of the fifty states, or an overwhelming Congressional majority—is nonetheless limited, is a crucial feature of American life”

JF: For an avowed secularist, you’ve devoted a significant amount of your work to the subject of religion. During the writing of your dissertation which would become the basis for The Revolution of the Saints, you were sent to North Carolina to cover the Woolworth’s sit-ins for Dissent magazine. In your accounts of that period, you’ve suggested that it was difficult for many of your colleagues in New York to reconcile the revolutionary political action of the civil rights movement with the strong religious currents underwriting the endeavor. What is it about the American political environment that enables such unexpected alliances and affinities? And, where do conservative movements fit within this revolutionary tradition?

MW: Protestantism, even Evangelical Protestantism, was a very important part of revolutionary politics in the late eighteenth century. One of the things that came out of the Second Great Awakening in America was abolition, which was very much a religious movement; so too was prohibition, but we’re less eager to talk about that one. Prohibition was also a feminist movement because drunken men were the main object of the Prohibitionists’ critique. And then there’s the Social Gospel movement which played an important part in progressive politics in the early twentieth century. It’s a long history; the civil rights movement was just the latest aspect of it. To come back to what I said about the revolutionary Protestants, it would be very interesting to try to figure out, if there were some evidence for this, what the views of the black Baptist ministers were on questions of gender equality and gay rights. Fred Shuttlesworth ended up with very right wing positions on these issues although he was one of the fiercest of the civil rights preachers in Birmingham. I met him on my second trip to the South. I went first to North Carolina and then to Alabama and Georgia a few months later, and I spoke in Shuttlesworth’s church on a challenge. But he turned out to be very conservative on gender issues and gay rights, so that may be a point where the Protestant left turns to the right. There are, of course, other parts of the American religious world that are active on the left. The radical nuns are an amazing part of it; a lot of them went to Central America or South America at some point and came back to the U.S. having been radicalized by political struggles there. Reform Rabbis tend to be liberal left, and Reconstructionist rabbis, who are now mostly women, even more so. But I’m a secular Jew and my interest in these religious movements comes from a sense that the secular left is not reproducing itself and that we have to understand what it is about religion that enables it to sustain itself across generations. I don’t think the explanation is godcentered, but rather it has a lot to do with the ability of a religion to shape everyday life, to give us a calendar, and to mark the life cycle. I recently went to the funeral of a Jewish atheist; it was very sad because there was no ceremony and nobody knew what to say; nobody knew when to weep. It’s so incredibly awkward, and for that reason, most of the secular Jews I know want somebody to say Kaddish for them. It’s not the words, but the music that becomes important. I think secularists have to figure out how to engage with these religious traditions. It has to be a critical engagement because there are still many things, hierarchy and inequality and unreason, that should be criticized and rejected, but you can’t just walk away from it; it’s too powerful and we have to understand that power.

JF: What role do objects and rituals play in establishing some measure of continuity through a secular tradition?

MW: Memorials and monuments are probably the most important features of a civic religion. I grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania right after the Second World War—I was ten years old in 1945—and Memorial Day in that town, in those years, was a very emotional experience; everybody came to the cemetery. And then they made this incredible mistake of making Memorial Day not May 30th, but the nearest Monday, changing a communal holiday into a long weekend or a short vacation. Nobody is at the cemetery anymore. With a monument like the Vietnam memorial— even for people who hated that war and fought against it—it’s very moving just to be there. I was recently in Berlin and I saw Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial. It was fantastic. (We were both teaching at Princeton in the early 1960s and we had houses next to each other.) When I saw the memorial, I decided that he was put on this earth just to do that.

JF: Beyond the question of monuments, you’ve also spoken about the importance of objects and spaces in producing a plurality of social meanings. How can the built environment be more amenable to civic engagement?

MW: For a long time people were designing shopping centers with the idea of excluding protests or demonstrations or leafleting or any of that sort of political activity. But designers should be thinking in exactly the opposite way. I once wrote a piece in Dissent about the dangers of what I called “single-minded space.” I took the suburban shopping center as an example of such space—where you’re supposed to park the car and get out and go to three different stores and buy a lot of stuff and bring it back to the parking lot. But shopping centers have changed, they’ve begun to put tables and chairs in the spaces around the shops, and I see teenagers hanging out the way they would on a city street in what I would think of as a better environment, but still they’re doing the best they can with the shopping center. I think it’s important for there to be public spaces that are amenable to both celebrations and protests, like Zuccotti Park or Union Square in New York which used to be a place where people would go and there’d be speakers all around as in Hyde Park in London. Habermas made so much of the coffee house; that’s a place where people can talk to one another about politics. There have to be places like that, and I suspect that in the absence of such obvious places for assembly, people will make them.

JF: In essays such as “Civility and Civic Virtue in Contemporary America,” “What Does it Mean to Be an ‘American’?” and “Pluralism: A Political Perspective,” you’ve sketched a portrait of American political life where the form or framework of our political associations is necessarily distinct from the values and identifications which animate our personal lives and which are debated within this framework of pro-tected political space. What is at stake in defining America through its political form?

MW: In the 1950s, there was an effort to define an American purpose, a national purpose, which seemed so forced and artificial. You could say that America’s purpose is to be open to the purposes of all its immigrant communities. One view of America you get with communitarians like Michael Sandel who really admires the early Republic, its civic virtue, its strong sense of citizenship, and the participation in elections with bonfires and marches and celebrations and strong party affiliations. But that Republic was a relatively homogenous society. The Anglo-American settlers thought they were creating a nation-state like the ones in Europe. And then came the waves of immigration— first in the 1840s—and that America was overwhelmed. I’ve always believed that the decisive fact about American history is that the Anglo- Americans who thought they had created their own place allowed themselves to become a minority in that place. The process was accompanied by a lot of resistance and some resentment—know-nothing politics, and all that—but nonetheless the majority allowed themselves to become a minority. That’s just not going to happen in any of the old European nation-states. And after that great transformation, we were something more like a nation of nationalities held together by our politics and not by ethnicity or religion. This is why the Fourth of July and Memorial Day were and are such important holidays. And that’s why you can have in the U.S. an “un-American activities committee,” where you would never have an “un-Italian activities committee” because in Italy even the communists are “Italian.” But here, the union was political, not an ethnic one. That’s what held us together: this Constitution, this form of government. That’s what America is.

JF: Along with the matter of protecting the political arena, your work frequently references the complementary issue of scale. From the shaping of the calendar to the ritual of Election Day, which demonstrates that “the political order is built to a human scale,” there appears to be both a spatial and a symbolic component to your use of the term. You’ve also resisted reducing the scope of political action to either a function of top-down or bottom-up processes, instead suggesting ways in which the grassroots efforts of civil society can benefit from state or institutional intervention and vice versa. What motivates your investigation into the potential of these sorts of scalar relationships?

MW: The business of the top-down comes right out of my sense of what happened with the labor movement in the U.S., where there were many efforts to organize workers in the Depression but without great success until the federal government stepped in. Congress passed the Wagner Act and gave teeth to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and those actions transformed the political spaces within which labor organization could take place. It opened those places and it prevented the corporate police from shutting them down, which they’d always been able to do. Johnstown, PA, which is where I grew up, was the place where the little steel strike was broken in 1937. It turned out that most of the city council was in the pay of Bethlehem Steel. Their corruption was uncovered by the La Follette Committee of the U.S. Senate and not by the local journalists because the journalists were also in the pay of Bethlehem Steel— the local paper was Bethlehem’s organ. And then, during WWII, the government, with the NLRB, since they didn’t want strikes in the middle of the war, forced Bethlehem Steel to negotiate a contract with the union. That move transformed life in the city. Suddenly, people had a little money. They could afford to go to a doctor; they could afford to take a couple weeks of vacation. It really changed the life of the city. And since I was the son of a Jewish merchant, I saw that suddenly there were steel workers coming in to buy a piece of jewelry for their wives who had never been able to do that before.

JF: In “Liberalism and the Art of Separation,” you argue that politics is a perpetual act of drawing lines and arguing about where lines should be drawn. Politics here becomes a form of art rather than a march toward a single political truth. The idea of the necessity of defining limits among and within different spheres of political and economic life is particularly fraught with its connection to the rhetoric of individual autonomy, yet you’ve been very active in identifying the capacity of boundaries to enable collective practices. How would you characterize this highwire act?

MW: The American sense of limits can, in the hands of a group like the Tea Party, be paralyzing; it can be an expression of an effort to prevent any kind of collective political action. The far right today forgets that many of the founders, such as Alexander Hamilton, intended a vigorous and robust state. In its proper form, the art of separation opens the way for political mobilizations from below. It opens the way for state action. But it also sets limits on what majorities can do, after they win. I think one of the clearest problems in the Middle East today is the belief that democracy is just majoritarianism, and that if you win an election you can do anything you want—even if it means there will never be another election. But here, somehow, the lesson took hold that there are limits to what you can do. And one of the purposes of those limits is to make sure that it is possible for those in power to lose the next time around. The belief that power—even of a President who has won forty out of the fifty states, or an overwhelming Congressional majority—is nonetheless limited, is a crucial feature of American life. In the 1930s, it began to be recognized that such a sense of limitation had to extend to civil society. If governments were limited, then corporations had to be limited, and maybe the government had to be the agent of corporate limitation. So far, however, we have succeeded in establishing a very strong sense of separation of powers and the limits of majoritarianism in the state, but we have not succeeded in controlling economic power.

JF: Part of the idea behind the consideration of politics as the art of perpetual debate resides in your consideration of the value of bargaining over that of deliberation. This understanding of politics incorporates both the rational and irrational aspects of political actors, as well as the role of cultural and symbolic factors which can upset many of the bestintentioned efforts to reach a sustained political consensus. What draws you to the work of bargaining?

MW: The problem with deliberation is that it depends on disinterestedness. That’s the way a jury works; at least you try to make sure that no one on the jury has any interest in the outcome of the trial. And, politics can’t be like that because we do have interests in the outcomes of political disputes. We’re not disinterested. We don’t have the view from nowhere of this conflict; we’re right in the middle of it. That’s what politics is: it’s the engagement of people with interests and passions and ideals in political space, and it’s an engagement designed to be always unfinished; always open to a new iteration.

JF: Much has been made of recent developments in political organization through crowdsourcing technology and social media. At the same time, however, it’s unclear if this emphasis on the spontaneous power of the crowd lends itself to an engaged citizenry or if it facilitates a sense of anonymity that mitigates against the risks of personal political engagement. How do you view these modes of participation?

MW: I’ve tried to think about these issues, though as something of an outsider. The Obama campaign assembled something like thirteen million email addresses, and I thought that could perhaps become a source of political strength. It seems to have worked primarily in getting organizers into the streets— with lists of people about whom there was quite a bit of information—to knock on doors and to talk to people. But when they later tried to use those email lists to mobilize support for some of the programs of the Obama administration, it didn’t work at all. So, I continue to believe that even in today’s world, where the local branch of the party hardly exists anymore, politics should be face-to-face. A really strong mobilization has to be faceto- face. You don’t get the same kind of commitment from people otherwise. In 1967 I was active in something called the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on Vietnam; this was an effort to do SDStype community organizing against the war. We went knocking on doors; you knocked on doors until you found someone who was willing to give you their living room, and then you had a block meeting in that living room. We were doing that all over the city. At that time there was still a Cambridge branch of the Democratic Party and we moved in and even managed to send a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Now that’s all gone, and I think it’s a loss. I don’t know how to reproduce that kind of local politics.

JF: Writing on the Partisan Review and “the function of little magazines,” Lionel Trilling argued: “We must take into account what would be our moral and political condition if the impulse which such a magazine represents did not exist, the impulse to make sure that the daemon and the subject are served, the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of mind.” What is the civic function of such publishing efforts today?

MW: There’s also Irving Howe’s famous line: “when intellectuals don’t know what to do, they start a magazine.” The point of starting a magazine in 1954 was to try to define and sustain a certain left tradition in politics and to create a group of people who were committed to arguing about the meaning and possibilities of left politics and working to strengthen it. I guess that’s still more or less how I think about Dissent. But the tradition of the small magazine—starting, say, with the Westminster Review in the 1820s—is very attractive. The idea is to have of a good number of these magazines, each with attached writers and readers, each with a core of very committed writers and a periphery of more or less committed readers—and the peripheries overlap with other peripheries of other cores and you get a lively intellectual and political culture. It’s an important part of the way democracy should work. The goals of magazines dealing with architecture, for example, may extend to politics, but also move beyond it to other considerations such as how a country or a culture thinks about the shape of its cities or the character of its buildings— and again, you want there to be many voices. And, yes, the editors have to read each other’s magazines.