The Paradox of Liberation, by Michael Walzer

Over his long career as a political philosopher, Michael Walzer has probed issues of power and truth, and he has kept in purview the moral-theological dimension of such questions from a perspective rooted in his own Jewish tradition. This modest volume was originally his Henry L. Stimson Lectures at Yale. The name of Stimson, secretary of war during World War II, suggests an urbane, unblinking, critical reflection on power as it is channeled through nation-states.

Walzer ad­dresses the interplay be­tween social revolutions that he regards as secular and reactive counterrevolutions that have deep roots in religious tradition. He weaves in and out among three case studies: the founding of the state of Israel, the emancipation of Algeria by the National Liberation Front, and the independence of India from the British Empire. Walzer knows most about the case of Israel, less about India, and least about Algeria. But his typology suggests that the same historical-­political dynamics operate in each case.

Walzer’s sympathies are all on the side of the liberation movements led by those he tags as militants. In each case cited, the liberation movement was led by people who had been schooled in the secular Enlightenment culture of the oppressors and who championed a form of liberation that could respond effectively to a context of oppression. In each case, however, that liberation was an imposition that lacked intimate contact with the culture of those whom the militants genuinely sought to liberate. And because each liberation was imposed from a perspective inimical to indigenous religious tradition and was not at all negotiated, the militants were regularly followed or responded to by “zealots” who championed old traditions and resisted many of the assumptions of the secular liberationists.