Word: walzer
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...WALZER'S ARGUMENT that the social critic is less damaging and more constructive if he uses arguments internal to a particular society's experience is likewise provocative but inconclusive. In other writings, he has insisted that people should enjoy the right of self-determination--not because their particular histories embody such rights but because they are human beings...
This tension reveals perhaps the crucial point: Walzer defends the interpretive model he embraces by offering many examples of Jewish rabbinical interpretation and story-telling. Indeed the third chapter of his book initially was presented before the Harvard Hillel, an audience familiar with that tradition's rich biblical foundations. For Jews deeply concerned with Judaism at a personal and political level--and Walzer is such a person--these stories and the approach they embody are deeply persuasive. But Walzer forgets that the language of rights and duties, a language which Rawls attempts to sharpen and shape, has an enduring history...
...crossed the Atlantic deliberately distanced themselves from their previous circumstances and took a vast risk with the unknown. They knew that while they would take many memories with them, they were also leaving much behind. Eventually these people would justify their new constitution in the very universal language Walzer now questions. The universalistic claims of our moral heritage are part of our American communal experience--a fact that makes Walzer's critique of them ironic...
...going too far to argue that Jewish communitarians such as Walzer and Sandel are engaged in a moving but ultimately very particular struggle to synthesize two moral languages, that of American democracy on the one hand and that of the Jewish shtetl on the other? Such an argument would account for Walzer often slipping into a language of universal human rights. But it would explain equally well why Walzer finds in textual criticism his model for social criticism. Has not the community of which he is a part survived by finding a homeland in religious texts...
...activity both familiar and strange to them. The sons are engaged in a practice wrenched from its original circumstances, geography and social environment, yet it is one that allows them to be a family again; it is a practice that is somehow their own. They, like Walzer, have become communitarians who must find their home in memories, memories of a life that lies back across...