Michael Walzer on Just War Theory's "critical edge": more like a spoon than a knife.

• Author: Calhoun, Laurie

In Arguing about War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), Michael Walzer presents a collection of essays treating topics that have been widely discussed in the post-9/11 period. These essays, which Walzer terms "political acts," first appeared from 1981 to 2003 in venues as diverse as military journals, newspapers, and intellectual magazines, including the leftist quarterly Dissent, of which Walzer is coeditor. The essays together provide a fair representation of Walzer's views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when and why we must engage in warfare, the "war on terrorism," and "global governance."

"The Triumph of Just War Theory" sketches a history of the classical "just war" tradition and the early development of Walzer's own political thought, decisively affected by the horrors of Vietnam, which convinced him and many others that moral constraints must be imposed upon warfare. Among those, like Walzer, predisposed to reject pacifism, discussions during that period led to a resurgence of interest in "just war theory," and people have been speaking its idiom ever since, evaluating this or that military mission by appeal to the jus ad bellum conditions for the just waging of war and the jus in hello conditions for the just conduct of war. Walzer sums up what he regards as "the triumph" of just war theory as follows: "Perhaps naively, I am inclined to say that justice has become, in all Western countries, one of the tests that any proposed military strategy or tactic has to meet--only one of the tests and not the most important one, but this still gives just war theory a place and standing that it never had before" (p. 12).

Walzer's writing on war flickers with lucidity, while at the same time displaying his uncanny ability to broach a significant philosophical problem only to scurry quickly away, seeking refuge in the received view, as though the topic had never been raised. So, for example, Walzer himself poses the incisive question: "But does this mean that it [war] has to be more just or only that it has to look most [sic] just, that it has to be described, a little more persuasively than in the past, in the language of justice?" (p. 11). Without pausing for even a moment, he proceeds to answer his own question as follows: "The triumph of just war theory is clear enough; it is amazing how readily military spokesmen during the Kosovo and Afghanistan wars used its categories, telling a causal story that justified the war and providing accounts of the battles that emphasized the restraint with which they were fought" (p. 11). Although this pronouncement appears in the opening essay of a collection entitled Arguing about War, precisely what is missing here is an argument or, for that matter, any reason at all for accepting the naive as opposed to the skeptical interpretation of the triumph of just war rhetoric.

Walzer celebrates the fact that many generals and political leaders now speak the language of just war theory, as eager as high school debaters to invoke the concepts of jus ad bellum and jus in hello in their discussions of war. But the question remains: What does this rebirth of interest in Latin really mean? Surely Walzer understands why military spokespersons invariably speak of "collateral damage" and "engaging the enemy," rather than employing their considerably more graphic and less genteel translations. The use of euphemistic language in describing the horrors of war is the requisite...