Introduction
Can one set out from the singular to think the universal, or must one abstract oneself from it in order to reach directly an ideal presumed to be common?
The difficulty comes from the fact that there are multiple definitions of this common ideal. On the religious plane in particular, we know that the three monotheisms are characterized by their universalist claim. This is of course the case with the Jewish religion, whose most famous injunctions — from the Decalogue’s “Thou shalt not kill” to Leviticus 19:18’s precept “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” — are addressed to all of humanity. And so that there be no ambiguity about Judaism’s universal scope, Levinas recalls, for example, that “In the cave where our patriarchs and mothers repose, the Talmud also has Adam and Eve repose: it is for all of humanity that Judaism came.”1 And the whole ethical side of Levinas’s work is inscribed in a perspective where the source is singular, the Torah, but its ethical reach is universal. Earlier, Hermann Cohen, also a philosopher and thinker of the religious, had clarified the relations between Jewish singularity and the universalism of the ethical ideal in particular. Singularity is embodied first in the sources of Judaism, which enjoy an “undeniable intellectual and spiritual priority” and retain a new and living fecundity for all the other sources that have been the gushings-forth from them.2 The singularity of Judaism is expressed next in the method: “This relation between theory and practice is what durably determines Judaism (….) The Pentateuch is therefore at once a source for the ideas that the national spirit forms and for the practical realizations that it installs.”3 In other words, contrary to Christianity or to Kant’s categorical imperative, which prescribe from the outset a conformity to an ethical ideal — i.e., an abstract universalism — Judaism according to Hermann Cohen takes the concrete person into consideration; and proposes to him a method, a path, with the teaching of the Torah, to accede progressively to the ethical ideal.4
Furthermore, the Jewish-American thinker Michael Walzer has taken up afresh the question of the opposition between universalism and particularism, which he proposes to surmount, in a text that has become a reference: “The Two Universalisms”.5 On the methodological plane, Walzer’s approach contains two important innovations with respect to the orientations cited above: first, setting out from the example of the Jewish people, Walzer proceeds to a cultural reading of the texts of the tradition and to an analysis of its social experience across the whole of its history, surmounting the cleavages between believers and non-believers; second, his analysis, beyond the Jewish people, extends historically or potentially to all peoples in their relation to singularity and universality.
Concerning the Jewish people in particular, Walzer unveils the existence of a Jewish universalism, whose progressive and evolutive nature stands as a counter-example to the dominant universalism, supposed to impose itself on all from above, everywhere and for always. In this perspective, the author shows how the great texts of the tradition and the Jewish experiences across history produce teachings, in the order of emancipation and ethics in particular, that diffuse far beyond the Jewish populations themselves.
In this article, we will first present Michael Walzer’s thesis on the opposition between two conceptions of the path toward universality, on the one hand, and, on the other, on the specificities of Jewish universalism — a universalism “from below,” anchored in the evolutive traditions of this people.
Then, with the episode of the Exodus of the Hebrews according to the biblical narrative, we will see how the author applies his problematic, revealing the coexistence in the Hebrew Bible of the two universalisms — a universalism of overhang and a universalism of reiteration, decentralized and progressive — before the Jewish Diaspora progressively adjusts its social practice to a universalism based on the exchange of experiences with the surrounding cultures. At the same time, in his analysis of this biblical episode, Walzer gives us a masterly demonstration of the influence of this narrative on a great number of first-rank actors throughout history — political, religious, social — and on Western populations more generally, as a reference of universal scope, under its two characteristics.
Furthermore, Michael Walzer shows us that his problematic of differentiated conceptions of universalism has a general reach on the political plane in particular, beyond the sole domain of values and principles. Thus, at a more operative stage, Walzer applies a procedure identical to that of Jewish universalism “from below” to the domain of social criticism, opposing two conceptions of this pre-political mode of analysis and action: that, on the one hand, leaning on general theories disconnected from the particular societies on which they are supposed to operate; and that, on the other, founded on a close relation with the specific values and history that govern each observed society.6 We will present different examples of decentralized modes of social criticism, opposing them to general “turnkey” theories.
The two universalisms
Is it possible to surmount an opposition ruinous for any reflection on society — on questions of social justice, of liberty, of political organization — between the universalist and particularist postures? Between those who, animated by the sole universalist reference, claim to formulate theories valid for any human community, whatever its history, its tradition, and its specific culture; and those, attentive to the particular alone, who privilege an anchoring in each community observed, drawing out the specific traits that characterize it?
The universalists see themselves accused by their detractors, at best, of confining themselves to abstract theories that fail to engage with the realities of social life; at worst, of arrogance and contempt with regard to all that characterizes cultures in their differences and their constitutive personalities. The particularists, for their part, are castigated for their so-called “relativist,” even conservative positions, supposed to accord an equivalent value to any social system without subjecting it to the test of criticism or evaluation.
In Les deux universalismes (The Two Universalisms), Michael Walzer proposes a third way permitting the surmounting of the contradiction between universalism and particularism, drawing, at the outset, on the sources of the Hebrew Bible.
To exit the impasse, Walzer proposes to reason from universalist positions, but bringing a major corrective to the common understanding of this question. There exists, he maintains, not one but two universalisms: the first, dominant in Western consciousness, is a universalism that comes from above, with the claim to fashion all human communities around a single conception of the good life, of ethical excellence, of the just society or of the good political regime. This centralizing universalism, Walzer qualifies as a universalism of overhang. The second is a universalism from below, decentralized, where each society progresses by following its own path, adapting in particular experiences of liberation or emancipation from another people in function of its own social characteristics. This other universalism, occluded by the first, which draws on singular experiences, taken up but readapted while respecting the diversity of historical and cultural traditions, presents itself as a universalism of reiteration.
For Michael Walzer, the source of these two universalisms is inscribed in the Hebrew Bible.
Indeed, the universalism of overhang imposes a monolithic vision with “a single God, therefore a single law, a single justice, a single exact conception of the good life, of the good society or of the good regime, a single salvation, a single messiah, (…) for all of humanity.”7 In this version of Jewish universalism in biblical times, the Covenant concluded with God at Sinai, the moral and legal system that resulted from it with the Torah, are the foundations of the history of the Jews of course, but also concern all of humankind. The biblical texts record many statements that seem to derive from such an interpretation, overhanging all nations. For example, the prophet Isaiah reporting these words from God addressed to the whole people of Israel:
“I have made you the covenant of the people, the light of the nations…” (42:6)
The second universalism, of reiteration, is expressed within the biblical narrative itself, before the exile of the Hebrew people to Babylon around the sixth century B.C.E. Thus, in the book of the prophet Amos, the words of God for the peoples and their liberation no longer concern only the people of Israel:
“Children of Israel, you are mine, but are not the children of the Ethiopians also mine? I brought Israel out of Egypt. But did I not also bring the Philistines out of Cappadocia and the Syrians out of Cyrene?” (9:7)
In this second perspective, which Walzer presents as the true alternative doctrine of the Jewish people in biblical times, reiteration expresses the idea — taking the example of an event such as the Exodus of the Hebrews and their passage from slavery to liberty — that liberation is an adventure susceptible of repeating itself (or reiterating) for each oppressed people, but adapting it to each singular context. What is universal in this case is the rejection of oppression, but the operation of liberation realizes itself following a plurality of particular experiences.
For Walzer, there exists a link between the universalism of overhang and the idea of triumph, in particular through conquest. Now, according to the biblical narrative, Israel’s triumphant period lasted only three centuries, between the arrival in the “Promised Land,” in the wake of Joshua in the thirteenth century B.C.E., and the end of the reign of King Solomon in the tenth century B.C.E.
It is henceforth with the expansion of Christianity and the Christian, then secularized, nations that the universalism of overhang prospered. And this, in the form of the export of a universal mission, and even of “the imperialism of the nations that called themselves Christian.”
When Judaism becomes a religion in exile, it is repressed within the Christian nations. The second universalism, of reiteration, then becomes the alternative doctrine that imposes itself within Judaism.
The political meaning of the Exodus
In De l’Exode à la liberté (Exodus and Revolution)8, Michael Walzer centers his analysis not on what “God did,” but on “what men and women did with the biblical narrative [in the land of Israel] first, then what they did in the world, armed with this text”. Besides, the narrative is more important than the facts, Walzer clarifies — “and it took on an ever greater importance as it was repeated, meditated upon, drawn upon for argument, used to nourish folklore.”9 One can thus consider that this work presents itself as an illustration of Walzer’s thesis on the existence of a universalism of reiteration: but in this case, it is the experience of the Exodus of the Hebrews, or rather its narrative, that has served as a reference throughout history, nourishing many reiterations in the order of its political meaning in particular.
Indeed, numerous mentions of the biblical narrative of the Exodus across the centuries, within and above all outside the Jewish people, adopt a political and positive reading of this people’s founding epic. The story is of slavery and liberation, of law and contract through the Covenant with God, of “reactionary” revolt with the episode of the “Golden Calf” and the return to the worship of the old idols, of violent repression of the recalcitrants who threaten the project of emancipation in its essence; and, conversely, of progressive maturation, through the forty years of wandering in the desert, of the moral exigencies of Emancipation; finally, of accession to stabilized self-government in the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. Moreover, the model of the narration is that of a linear movement forward, which presents itself as a goal, a hope, a promise where the final situation of the Jewish people across the episode of the Exodus is radically different from the starting situation. It opposes itself to the myths of the eternal return — that of the Odyssey of Ulysses described by Homer, for example — in which political mutations are only cyclical phenomena.
The model of linearity, of promise and of goal to attain set out from the Exodus, has moreover been many times convoked by multiple social or radical reformers, outside the Jewish people. One finds, for example, important references to the Exodus in the political discourses of Oliver Cromwell in the Puritan revolution of seventeenth-century England, or, in the same sense, in Jean Calvin. But these references are far more numerous still in reformers such as Benjamin Franklin, who saw in the Exodus a symbol of American emancipation from British tutelage, or even in the early Marxists. More recently, in the 1960s, the symbolism of the Exodus was convoked as much by Black American preachers in support of the struggle for equal rights as by the theologians of liberation in Latin America.
Finally, the Exodus is naturally “at the center of Jewish thought, and one finds it in all autonomous Jewish political enterprises from the revolt of the Maccabees to Zionism”. Zionism being, according to Walzer, “a call for an exodus in the full sense of the term, the deliverance from an oppression and a journey to the Promised Land.”10
One finds more particularly two sources of reflection in the narrative of the Exodus: first, the Contract of Covenant between God and the Hebrew people, which founds the birth of the Jewish people; second, the debate between political reformism and radicalism, set out from the episodes with divergent consequences of the repression consequent on the episode of the “Golden Calf,” on the one hand, and of the forty years of wandering of the Hebrews in the desert, on the other.
The Contract of Covenant: a narrative many times reiterated, within and outside the Jewish world
In the biblical narrative, God (Yahweh) makes His Voice heard to the whole Hebrew people gathered around Mount Sinai, three months after its departure from Egypt. Through the intermediary of Moses, God proposes to the Hebrew people a Covenant materialized by a moral Contract, whose terms must be heard and approved by each of the members of the people. The Israelites are asked to apply the juridical and moral doctrine contained in the Torah, a document dictated by God; in exchange, Yahweh grants His Covenant to the Hebrew people, considered as the chosen people (but, in certain interpretations, all those who accept the Covenant may be “chosen”), and access to the Promised Land so that the people may perpetuate its emancipation.
If the presentation of the Covenant episode in the Torah is rather laconic, its interpretations, religious or secular, are extremely abundant. Indeed, the act of Covenant is creative of the people in that, Walzer explains, in Egypt the Israelites have in common only a tribal memory, welded by the same oppression; their identity, like that of men in slavery, is a received identity, one that imposes itself on them without their having to consciously adhere to it. By contrast — and this is a major political innovation — “it is only with the Covenant that they constitute themselves a people in the full sense of the term, capable of assuming a moral and political history, capable of obeying and also of resisting, stiff-necked, of going forward or of falling back into wandering. The Covenant is truly the crucial fact, and it is important to explore it fully.”11
Who are the contracting parties? It is important to underscore that each Israelite, man or woman, according to the associated commentary of the Midrash, gives his assent on an individual basis, that the ancient hierarchies are abolished at this moment, and that the Covenant solemnly engages each of the members of the Hebrew people. The Covenant contract thus reflects a consensus of the Israelites realized democratically, starting from the will of individuals “independent who have not consulted with each other”. The Hebrew people thus acquired a capacity for decision, a free will it did not possess in Egypt where an absolute and all-powerful God took all the decisions for its liberation. Moreover, in giving the Torah to the Hebrew people, God at the same time gives it the means to emancipate itself, in particular with respect to the divine omnipresence that had prevailed until then; and to accomplish the moral law in complete independence, with the aid of this body of doctrine, as a function of its social experience.
This concourse of divine will at the outset and of popular engagement in complete independence, this alloy of providence and contract, of determinism and liberty, is according to Walzer “the characteristic of the political lesson of the Exodus and of all the successive versions of a revolution of the same type.”12
Finally, in a much-commented passage of the narrative of the divine intervention at Mount Sinai, the biblical message seems to address itself, from its very enunciation, to all men who wish to hear it, beyond the sole Hebrew people:
“And it is not with you alone that I conclude this Covenant… but also… with whoever is not here today with us (Deut. 29:13–14).”
Such words open onto a universal dimension of the idea of divine election, in the direction of all men or peoples who wish it, provided they accept to inscribe themselves in the framework of the Covenant contract. The formulation of this divine message questions the very legitimacy of the idea of an elect or chosen people supposedly assigned to the Hebrew people, then to the Jewish people.
The episode of the “Golden Calf” and its political implications: radical revolution or progressive reformism
References to the Exodus narrative, in terms of political orientation and practice, have given rise to two types of distinct, indeed contradictory interpretations across history: some have found in it a justification of the revolutionary problematic; others, by far the most numerous within Judaism in particular, place the accent on progressive emancipation, of “social-democratic” connotation, expressed by the very long period of maturation that the Hebrews impose on themselves in the desert before their attainment of the Promised Land in Canaan.
It is the famous episode of the Golden Calf and of the massacre of heretics that followed, on the order of Moses, that founded the revolutionary reading. Let us briefly recall the facts related in the Torah: after having consented to the Covenant, upon hearing the divine Voice, a group of dissidents within the people — taking advantage of the prolonged waiting for the return of Moses, occupied with the writing of the Tables of the Law — manages to turn part of the Hebrews by inciting a festive demonstration around an Egyptian idol, the “Golden Calf” (whereas the sacralization of idols is one of the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments). At the sight of what he considers a betrayal of the Hebrew people’s sacred engagement, threatening the whole project of the people’s emancipation built around the Covenant, Moses, after having broken the Tables of the Law under the grip of an enormous anger, takes the decision to have his faithful (the Levites) kill some three thousand men. The formulation of the order of the massacre is all the more violent in that it incites the executors not to spare their own kin:
“Put each man his sword to his thigh! Pass and repass from gate to gate in the camp, kill, whether his brother, his companion, or his neighbor” (Ex. 32:26–28).
This terrible episode, which Walzer submits to criticism, has of course been very abundantly commented and interpreted. Contemporary historians even think that the Golden Calf episode is a late addition from the period of the kings in the tenth century B.C.E., for reasons more political than religious, so much is it in rupture with the problematic of progressive maturation of the unfolding of the Exodus. Be that as it may, important theologians such as Saint Augustine or Jean Calvin, and great political strategists like Machiavelli, found justifications for the repression consequent on the betrayal of the Golden Calf. For the latter, for example: whoever reads the Bible with his good sense will see that Moses was constrained, to ensure the observance of the Tables of the Law, to have an infinity of people put to death. In the same sense, at the moment of the Bolshevik revolution, an American author of a book on the Exodus and a partisan of Leninism, Lincoln Steffens, found in this narrative, and even in the Golden Calf episode, a justification for the idea of progressive purge: “Each time a nation constructs a new system of laws and customs, it experiences a red terror; each time it defends an ancient system, it experiences a white terror.”13
But the most current reading within Judaism — Maimonides’ interpretation in his Guide for the Perplexed, which is authoritative in the commentaries on the Torah — privileges the long reflection of the Hebrews in the desert for forty years, the duration necessary to, on the one hand, assimilate the implications of the Covenant on the moral plane and, on the other, witness the birth of a new generation not handicapped by the traces of servitude in Egypt. For Maimonides indeed: “It is not in the nature of man, after having been raised in a servile labor… that he should suddenly wash the stain from his hands.” It follows that “God used foresight in making these men wander in this desert until they had become valiant… and, moreover, men were also born who were not accustomed to baseness and servitude.”14
This reading of the Exodus in terms of gradual reformism passing through a transition period as long as necessary, Walzer qualifies, on a secular and political plane, as the social-democratic version of the Exodus. It was thus also interpreted by Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg). The latter attributes to Moses, and not to God, the wisdom of inciting a progressive evolution of consciousnesses, surpassing the immediate carryings-away and the murderous pulsions still present, even in the great guide, across the episode of the Golden Calf.
The divergent principles of contemporary social criticism
How better to ground, in the contemporary era, the gradual reformism — political modality of the universalism of reiteration — that Michael Walzer detects in the biblical narrative of the Exodus? Here again, he draws on the prophetic tradition, in two ways: on the one hand, by according a great importance to social criticism — the internal criticism of the behavior of the powerful in particular, and of the correlative social injustice — as a pre-political phase prior to any proposal of reform; on the other hand, by situating criticism and the perspectives of evolution in close relation with the traditions that the populations concerned have themselves developed.
Thus Michael Walzer, in one of its most fruitful applications, broadens his method of identifying the divergent forms of universalism to the pre-political domain of contemporary social criticism, a distant echo of the social criticism of biblical times. More precisely, he distinguishes two modalities of exercising this social criticism in our era, which have very different implications in terms of receptivity by the populations concerned:
One of the paths consists in disconnecting reflection with respect to the particular society subjected to criticism, and giving a general scope to its results, in the form of reference principles applicable to any society in all times and all places: it is a criticism by invention of principles with a universal claim. This path of criticism inscribes itself within the framework of the universalism of overhang. Examples: Marxism (historical materialism and the general evolution of societies); the utilitarian doctrine (maximizing satisfactions for the maximum of individuals); or John Rawls’s principles of justice (imperative of socio-economic progression limited to the most disadvantaged of society).
The other path of criticism, by contrast, remains closely connected to the social world concerned. It responds in fact to the double concern to address itself to the greatest number, on the one hand, and, in this perspective, to inscribe itself within the framework of the history, tradition and culture of a given society, on the other. It is a criticism by interpretation of moral principles comprehensible by all that the society has given itself. This critical path is attentive to the expectations — latent or new — of the members of the society. It can perfectly integrate external critiques or experiences, on condition of resituating and interpreting them as a function of the cultural tradition of this particular society. We find here the characteristics of the universalism of reiteration.
The biblical foundations of criticism by interpretation
Michael Walzer is therefore going to base himself on Jewish thought inscribed in the Hebrew Bible to give a certain historical depth to his analysis. Let us note that in his reference work on ancient Judaism, Max Weber already evoked the biblical prophecies as the first political pamphlets — an observation broadened by Walzer, who presents the prophets as the inventors of the critical practice of society.15
The prophet Amos is probably the most emblematic of the great prophets on the plane of the criticism of behaviors, those of the powerful in particular, in reference to an interpretation of Jewish Law, and more specially in the domain of social justice. In the eighth century B.C.E., the period of the prophet’s life according to the biblical narrative, the monarchical reigns of a weakened and somewhat disorganized people of Israel, divided into two States (Judea in the south, Israel in the north), had given rise to a considerable increase in inequalities, with the appearance of an upper class living ever more clearly at the expense of a lower class. On this plane, the archaeological discoveries confirm the tendencies described by the biblical narrative, observing that the relatively uniform houses of the first centuries of the Hebrew people’s establishment on this land were replaced by a contrasting habitat between luxurious dwellings on one side and slums on the other.16
More serious still, not only do the rich have a mode of life that diverges from that of the poor, but they live off the exploitation of the poor. The rich merchants in particular are accused of practicing usury, fraud, the confiscation of the goods of the poor in case of insolvency. In reaction, the prophet Amos proclaims his interpretation of the Torah: rituals and sacrifices to the divine, to show one’s allegiance, are worth nothing in the absence of a behavior that respects the right and applies justice.
“I hate, I despise your feasts” (5:21), (…) “But let judgment run down like water, and righteousness like a torrent that does not run dry.” (5:24)
Amos’s prophecy, concludes Walzer, “is social criticism because it defies the rulers, the conventions and the ritual practices of a particular society, and does so in the name of values recognized and shared within that same society.”17
Walzer opposes this conception of social criticism practiced by the prophet Amos, in close correlation with his public, to that reported by the Bible concerning the prophet Jonah. It is a late narrative, posterior to the Exile of the Hebrews to Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E., where Jonah’s external enterprise, disconnected from his people, is in rupture with those of all the other prophets of Israel. Indeed, succinctly summarized: the word attributed to Yahweh allegedly ordered Jonah to go to Nineveh, the great city of the predatory State of Assyria, where violence and ignorance of the Commandments of the one God prevailed, to announce the destruction of the city if the inhabitants did not abandon their bad conduct. After a certain number of famous peripeties — Jonah begins by refusing and fleeing by ship, he is thrown into the sea by the sailors who fear Yahweh’s wrath, he is swallowed by a great fish and then spat out after his repentance — the prophet arrives at Nineveh and preaches in the street the divine word with this one sentence:
“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed” (3:4)
And the miracle occurs: the people of Nineveh, under the direction of their sovereign, begin to believe in Yahweh, then agree to abandon their bad practices. In return:
“God repented of the evil with which He had threatened them, He did not realize it” (3:10)
The prophet Jonah in this narrative, the only one of this type in the Hebrew Bible, appears as a simple messenger of God, completely detached with respect to the traditions and beliefs of the people he addresses. One can therefore think that he obtains an ephemeral result, perhaps founded on a minimalist code, a kind of international law already attested by the biblical narrative where certain extreme manifestations of violence were proscribed. Faced with the superficial character and the scarcely durable effects of Jonah’s action, the criticism of the prophet Amos is much more serious, the latter knowing perfectly the fundamental values of the people he addresses. And as he is a stakeholder in this people, he can, on the one hand, challenge it on the basis of these same values that he shares, and, on the other, propose reforms, in the matter of social justice in particular, that go much further than the sole register of the proscription of the crime of blood.
Social criticism in the modern era
Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Algerian War
In La critique sociale au XXe siècle (The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century) (1988), Michael Walzer analyzes, beyond the Jewish world, a certain number of practices of social criticism, generalizing his approach distinguishing “disconnected” critiques and critiques “connected” to the cultural characteristics of the social world concerned.
For example, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are representative figures of two opposed critical approaches during the war of independence of Algeria between 1954 and 1962: a solidarity with the French social world, particularly that of the French of Algeria, for the first; a detachment, and even a rupture with the French society of belonging for the second.
Camus’s critical approach, Walzer explains — that of interpretation — consisted in leaning on the norms of the colonial regime, supposedly guided by a spirit of justice, then unveiling the real experience of oppression: Camus pursued, in claiming a redistribution of lands, regional autonomy (at the beginning), equal rights for all the inhabitants of Algeria. From then on, Albert Camus found himself ever more alone on this line, both critical and solidary: on the one hand, France was not applying its own democratic norms; on the other, the Algerian FLN was claiming total independence without compromise. Camus was not opposed to independence in 1954, but he was opposed to an independence led by the FLN, which signified in his eyes the forced departure of the French of Algeria. He never joined either the unfailing supporters of the FLN, of its policy of negating the rights of the pied-noir minority, and of its terrorist methods as violent toward civilians as colonial violence. What justice demanded for Camus “is that the French and the Arabs negotiate their differences (…) he never succeeded (…) but that does not mean he was wrong to try.”18
Opposite Albert Camus’s conception of the critical intellectual situated within his society, Jean-Paul Sartre professed by contrast that “the life of a social critic must begin with the rejection of his own socialization, the refusal of the society-in-him”. It is, for the Sartrian critic, a matter of escaping his own social conditioning in order to universalize himself, at the risk of remaining incomprehensible to the essential part of his society of belonging. For Sartre, the critical intellectual must participate in the struggle between oppressors and oppressed, allying himself with the disadvantaged classes within, and with the motive forces of liberation outside. During the Algerian War, Walzer remarks, the Sartrian partisans of this thesis supported the FLN without expressing reservations about the program or methods of this movement. From then on, Walzer submits the Sartrian approach to a double objection: first, it remains incomprehensible to the broad masses of the dominated who are to be rallied within his society of belonging; second, it leads only to replacing one alienation with another: it is accompanied by no critical vision with respect to the promoters of the new cause embraced, to say the least debatable on the plane of the blind violence of its methods in particular.
Martin Buber: The political implications of Jewish ethics
The political practice of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, inspired by a form of social criticism drawing on the sources of Jewish ethics and the prophets of Israel, illustrates perfectly Walzer’s theory on the distinction between the approaches associated with this criticism.
Buber’s critical activity was in large part exercised against the orientations of Zionism in the Israeli-Arab conflict (which became an Israeli-Palestinian conflict after the Six-Day War of 1967). But — a crucial point — it was an internal criticism, from the point of view of a well-understood Zionist conception, and not an external criticism aimed at delegitimizing the very nature of Zionism. Thus he responded negatively to a request for an article formulated by an American anti-Zionist movement in 1962, declaring: “My criticism of the government’s Arab policy comes from within, yours from without. Our program of cooperation between Jews and Arabs is not inferior to what is called official Zionism — rather, it is a greater [i.e., better] Zionism.”19
For Buber, the principal danger threatening Zionism was that of all nationalisms seeking to affirm a sovereignty over a territory in a conflictual context: the loss of its ethical conscience, the cardinal value of Judaism for the philosopher.
On a more concrete plane — that is, more articulated with a political orientation — Buber proposed two further strategies of alignment with the moral foundations of Zionism. The first, particularly ambitious, consisted in rejecting the idea of a sovereignty of the Jews over a territory of their own and advocating the idea of a bi-national State (or later of a Federation) co-governed by Jews and Arabs. At the end of the 1930s, and above all after the tragedy of the Shoah, this option appeared as illusory in any foreseeable horizon, owing on the one hand to the Arab rejection of any Jewish presence as a settlement collectivity in Palestine, and on the other, to the influx of refugees with the absolute moral urgency of the Zionist claim of a free Jewish immigration into Palestine.
After the creation of the State of Israel, Martin Buber adopts an orientation which, while remaining critical, privileges solidarity and connection with the Jewish world: that of the preservation of the moral imperative. Thus, he denies the efficacy of violence without however adopting a pacifist position; he asks that the Israeli forces intervene only under explicit threat, that they react with a proportionality of means as a function of limited objectives; he rejects expropriations and reprisals; he seeks, finally, all opportunities to implement forms of cooperation.
Conclusion
In its issue devoted to “The Return of the Universal,” the journal Critique presented its version of the “quarrel of universalism,” setting out from the following observation: for a long time, the modern heirs of the philosophy of the “Enlightenment” believed in the universal character of their values. They thought themselves authorized then not only to contest on this basis their own situations but also to intervene in those of other civilizations. “Then something became confused. The universal became suspect, shady, troubling (…) was it not in the name of the ‘Enlightenment’ that colonization was justified? (…) that one was able to refuse women all political capacity? (…) that one doubted the political capacity of workers?”20 Thus, after the Second World War, several upheavals of political, social or moral character called into question the hegemonic version of a universalism imposed from above: decolonization and the fundamental condemnation of racism, the rise of feminism, the durable political irruption of the worker and popular world, even the emergence of a minoritarian and identity-based discourse.
Jewish thinkers however began much earlier to publicly define their own vision of universalism in opposition to the dominant universalism issuing from Christianity, in its religious or secularized form, which claimed to impose itself on all in their society of residence in the Diaspora. Thus Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the great thinker of the “Jewish Enlightenment,” defined in his Jerusalem a Jewish universalism by exemplarity in the execution of his historical mission, the struggle against idolatry — the latter being assimilated by Mendelssohn to a return to barbarism. Thus he specifies, to assume this mission within all of humankind: “[The Jewish nation] always indicates, by its institution and its constitution, by its laws, actions, destinies and changes, sound, authentic ideas of God and of His qualities, which it never ceases to teach, to proclaim, to preach, and seeks to preserve among the nations, so to speak by its existence.”21
In a similar perspective of exemplarity, but one that integrates the whole of the revealed Torah beyond the sole rejection of idolatry, Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) opposes the Jewish universalism by radiance to Christian universalism (in its religious or secularized form) which seeks to impose itself by encompassment: “The truth taught by Judaism does not propagate itself by encompassing in its catholicity the parcels of truth disseminated in all human civilizations.” But “not to impose one’s thought by war,” Levinas adds, has as its counterpart a solid reputation of particularism assigned to Judaism. It follows that “The universalism of radiance which the prophetic truth nevertheless claims thus remains unrecognized.”22
Benny Lévy (1945–2003), borrowing on this plane the path of theology, does not content himself with an opposition but establishes a qualitative difference between Jewish universalism, which he posits as intensive and of an authenticity superior to other universalisms — of religions, spiritualities, ethics, etc. — which proceed by simple extension of their own singularity. For Benny Lévy indeed, who bases himself on the fundamental Texts of the Jewish religious Tradition, the mission assigned to the Jewish people, also far beyond the sole struggle against idolatry, is the witnessing of “the One-God” through the vicissitudes of History. It follows that, for the philosopher-theologian, the Jew is considered as a concentrate of the form of man in his most intense expression. Mocking those French Jews of the Emancipation (the israélites) who, in the wake of their bringing-into-line in the Napoleonic era, considered themselves as the expression of a particularism come to join the universal, Benny Lévy reverses the relation: it is ridiculous, he maintains, to say “I become a French Jew, I open myself to the universal (…) The universal is the Jew.” And this, even if the Jew “can be failing and not be up to the level of this vocation — that is clear.” And Benny Lévy adds: “That is our case [to fail frequently in this mission] and it has been our case very often in our history.”23
More recently, Jean-Claude Milner — who does not present himself as a Jewish intellectual (in the sense of religious law) while adopting a personal relation to Jewishness — takes up the opposition between an intensive, demanding Jewish universalism, facing an extensive universalism, an “easy” universal according to the philosopher. Advocating the path of knowledge and not that of theology, Jean-Claude Milner establishes a genealogy of the notion of the universal, starting from Greek civilization — which founded it on the affirmative intensities of each Singular — up to Paul of Tarsus (Saint Paul) and his famous “neither Greek nor Jew” where singularities become interchangeable. This universalism, which then imposed itself by extension through Christianity then its secularization in Europe and the West, is to be denounced according to Milner not only because it levels singularities, hence its designation as “easy” or “whatever,” but because it permits no civic right to the other definition of universalism, set out from the intensity of the Singular and its radiance: “The establishment of the all and of the everywhere, on the horizon of the innumerable and the whatever — such is the ideal of the modern universal; whatever should chance to stand in its way is generally reputed condemnable.”24 For Milner, those who refuse to merge into the universal of the interchangeable and the whatever, who proceed by an intense affirmation of their singularity, are those whom he designates as bearers of the “Jewish name” — that is, those who affirm themselves as Jews (which does not cover the totality of Jews according to ethnic or religious definitions): “the affirmation of the Jewish name, insofar as it is not another, derives from the universal.” Indeed: “The universal is, name by name, nothing other than the affirmative force of a name insofar, precisely, as it is not another.”25
Michael Walzer’s theoretical construction, the opposition between universalism of overhang and universalism of reiteration26, is distinguished from the preceding formulations on three planes:
First, contrary to those of Moses Mendelssohn and Benny Lévy, Michael Walzer does not ground his demonstration on a religious reading, but on a cultural analysis of biblical sources and of the two currents of universalism they contain. (The formulation of Emmanuel Levinas can be interpreted under the religious angle or the ethical angle.) Thus, Walzer’s proposition is supposed to suit a religious as well as a secular reception.
Second, contrary to all the preceding approaches, Walzer does not limit his discourse to Judaism, which would be the sole opposition, in its dominant practice, to a Western universalism of overhang. On the contrary, from his presentation of a source of universalism from below, of reiteration, with the prophet Amos, he deduces a variety of paths toward the universal, in conformity with a variety of paths of emancipation according to countries and civilizations. (See above, p. 3.)
Third and finally, in distinction above all from Benny Lévy and Jean-Claude Milner, Michael Walzer’s opposition, even if it marks a preference for the universalism of reiteration (which he sometimes names the universalism of the “weak”), does not entail an unreserved condemnation of the universalism of overhang. But the precepts of the latter are receivable on one condition: that their propagators not claim to impose themselves everywhere, from above, from outside and “turnkey”; but that they take account of the adaptation to the traditions, cultures and values of each society supposed to integrate them. One must not see in this any “relativism” that would have one believe all societies are equivalent on the plane of individual and collective emancipation of their members, for example. On the contrary, Michael Walzer is very firm on the finalities of emancipation and ethical progression that should guide every society. But the paths, the rhythms diverge, and any attempt to impose itself from above provokes only reticence and the suspicion of a search for a form of domination.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Israël et l’universalisme,” in Difficile liberté, Albin Michel, poche essais, 1963 and 1976, p. 266.↩︎
Hermann Cohen, Religion de la raison tirée des sources du judaïsme (Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism), PUF, 1994 (1st edition: 1919), p. 21.↩︎
Ibid., p. 43.↩︎
See Sophie Nordmann, “Hermann Cohen ou la ‘religion de la raison’,” in Philosophie et judaïsme, PUF, 2008, p. 40.↩︎
Michael Walzer, “Les deux universalismes” (“The Two Universalisms”), in Pluralisme et démocratie, éditions Esprit, 1997 (first published in English, 1990), pp. 83–110.↩︎
See Simon Wuhl, Michael Walzer et l’empreinte du judaïsme (Michael Walzer and the Imprint of Judaism), Le Bord de l’Eau, 2017, pp. 15–22, 137–144 and 22–48.↩︎
Michael Walzer, “Les deux universalismes,” in Pluralisme et démocratie, op. cit., p. 84.↩︎
Michael Walzer, De l’Exode à la liberté. Essai sur la sortie d’Égypte (Exodus and Revolution) (1985). Calmann-Lévy, 1986.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 19.↩︎
Ibid., p. 94.↩︎
Ibid., p. 100.↩︎
Cited by Michael Walzer, Ibid., p. 84.↩︎
Ibid., p. 71.↩︎
Max Weber, Le judaïsme antique (Ancient Judaism), Plon, 1970, pp. 359–364. Cited by Michael Walzer, Critique et sens commun (Interpretation and Social Criticism) (1985), La Découverte, 1990, p. 85.↩︎
Cf. Michael Walzer, Critique et sens commun, op. cit., pp. 100–101.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 105–106.↩︎
Michael Walzer, “La guerre d’Algérie d’Albert Camus” (“Albert Camus’s Algerian War”), in La critique sociale au XXe siècle (The Company of Critics) (1988), Métailié, 1996, p. 159.↩︎
Cited by Michael Walzer, “La recherche de Sion chez Martin Buber” (“Martin Buber’s Search for Zion”), in La critique sociale au XXe siècle, op. cit., p. 80.↩︎
Patrice Maniglier, “L’universel contrarié,” in Critique, October 2016, p. 773.↩︎
Moses Mendelssohn, Jérusalem ou pouvoir religieux et judaïsme (Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism) (translation and presentation by Dominique Bourel), Gallimard, collection Tel, 2007, p. 160.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, “En exclusivité,” in Difficile liberté, Albin Michel, poche essais, 1976, pp. 359 and 360.↩︎
Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy, Le Livre et les livres. Entretiens sur la Laïcité, Verdier, 2006, p. 85.↩︎
Jean-Claude Milner, L’universel en éclats, Verdier, 2014, p. 65.↩︎
Ibid., p. 77.↩︎
Etienne Balibar, in his book Des Universels (Galilée, 2016), mentions this “fascinating elaboration” of Michael Walzer in the following presentation: “[Michael Walzer] opposes, starting from the example of the two currents of Judaism — the messianism of the chosen people and the prophetism of justice — what he calls a universalism of ‘overhang,’ virtually dominant and assimilating, to a horizontal universalism, which would be immanent to each community, but would also communicate with all the others, not according to the vertical modality of assimilation, but according to the modality of the example or of exemplarity.” (p. 75).↩︎