Walzer and the Social Sciences
7 December 2006 | amz
Though this time it’s been assigned for class, I always (or at least since first reading it in summer 1999) find myself returning to Just and Unjust Wars about every 2 years. This semester throws the schedule off — I last read it in the spring and it’s popped up on two syllabi for me this fall — but the book’s relevance, particularly as I navigate the treacherous waters of Ph.D.-focused Political Theory and International Relations while simultaneously working in professional politics, hasn’t faded, despite the efforts of the organized discipline to shunt it aside.
Most troubling in my recent readings has been my realization that the book — a “masterwork” according to ProfPTJ (a designation with which I’d most certainly agree) — simply wouldn’t fly were I to have turned it in as my own dissertation. Plagiarism be damned, the problems I’m talking about are deeper.
As our field, such as it is, has sought to define itself and gain ‘relevance’, we’ve moved further and further away from the very questions I think most relevant.
Walzer doesn’t offer causal models, there are no variables operationalized. And in the end, I may actually part company with him on the extent to which (1, anth) states are necessary or ethically legitimate. But the wholsale disciplinary rejection of this kind of theoretizing as insufficiently grounded seems to me a gross misapplication of the notion of “grounded theory”. Sure, attempts at grand (armchair) theory are frequently lacking. But what questions could be more relevant to the scholar, practitioner, or just-plain citizen (the first two can still be this last more important one) than the relative justice or injustice of wars in general and particular?
I know my cowriters here at AmAthens consider these questions both policy and morally relevant, and I’m fairly certain that my colleagues here consider them as having a certain relevance too; they just happen to think as well that they’re not sufficiently scientific.
Or, I hope, I’ve gotten this all wrong.
