Politics and Passion, Michael Walzer

Résumé du document

Nancy Fraser's powerful essay written in 1997 claims that our contemporary political culture has attained a position of being a ?post-socialist' as it directly stems from the collapse and dismay of the former Soviet Union. Fraser highlights the characteristics of our political culture and emphasizes three main features. The first feature speaks about the absence of a dominant historical theory of emancipation. Secondly, reflections have been targeted around the descending aspect of man's equality due to the high impact of aggressive commercialization and the rise of material inequalities. Finally, the feature about a displacement in the political grammar from questions of social democracy to questions of identity in politics is studied. The third reflection does not fail to ignore the problems and issues of recognition that has been replaced as against the ancient ones which circled around distribution and redistribution. Such a twist in cultural politics has provided our Political Culture with a framework within which debates on multiculturalism has been on the rise.

Extraits

[...] Often times, empowering a group means giving a lot of power to its political representatives or leaders, and very little to the mere members that stand at the periphery. This is what Walzer refers to as “mediated redistribution of resources”[18] that he describes as the way to address durable inequalities. But to my mind, a classical liberal would hardly be satisfied by this partial and unfair mode of redistribution. Then, insofar as Walzer perfectly epitomises the flight from socio-economic redistribution issues analysed by Fraser, he has a tendency to privilege “cultural groups” over economic classes or mere social destitutes. [...]

[...] Hence, empowerment is bound to favour some groups over the others and equality would thus be impinged upon once more. Furthermore, since a public choice is bound to be made on which group to empower, and the criteria according to which this decision will be taken not being specified by Walzer, the public leaders will have to renounce their neutrality and side with one group over the others. This comment leads us to the last part of our development, which precisely deals with neutrality. The last liberal promise to be confronted with Walzer's argument is neutrality. [...]

[...] Finally, I also hold Michael Walzer's theory of empowerment to deny the preponderant role of the individual as the fundamental unit of social interactions. In fact, Michael Walzer suggests that “given categorical inequality, the empowerment of individuals will come not simply by way of but permanently conjoined with the empowerment of groups”[15]. Here, he takes one step further by doing away with the forms of individual emancipation generally advocated by liberal thinkers. Empowerment has to focus on the group and only on the group, thus conceiving persons as undividable from the group they belong to. [...]

[...] Politics and Passion, Michael Walzer In a powerful essay wrote in 1997, American philosopher Nancy Fraser makes the claim that our contemporary Political Culture is “post-socialist” insofar as it directly stems from the collapse and dismay of the former Soviet Union[1]. She depicts our Political Culture as characterised by three main features: firstly the absence of a dominant historical theory of emancipation, then a decentring of the men's equality due to aggressive commercialisation and the rise of material inequalities, and finally a displacement in the political grammar from questions of social-democracy to questions of identity-politics inasmuch as the problematics of recognition have replaced the ancient ones of distribution and redistribution. [...]

[...] There is always some degree of individuality that Walzer seems to turn a blind eye on. It is attested by the fact that most of the members of these “involuntary associations” profoundly change their style of life as soon as they thrive. Since Walzer mentions the case of the Arabs in France, it is noteworthy that the young Muslims from the banlieues who go from rags to riches through hard work or exceptional talent more frequently than not move to the wealthy areas of the inner-cities and adopt a bourgeois lifestyle. [...]