Forty-one years ago, in the shadow of the Vietnam War, Michael Walzer published Just and Unjust Wars, an exploration of the morality of going to war and of war-fighting—a 20th-century update on the old problems of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. A professor at Harvard and Princeton University and long a member of the idiosyncratic left-wing intellectual crowd around Dissent magazine, Walzer established himself as an original thinker and laid the predicate for his lifelong willingness to call out fellow leftists as necessary for the sloppiness or shoddiness of their often abstract moral reasoning on matters of war and peace.

Vietnam was an unjust war, in Walzer’s view, one that should never have been fought. But for him, it hardly followed that all wars are unjust. At a time when a kind of nihilist pacifism was taking hold among many on the left, Walzer insisted on reminding his comrades of the moral necessity of World War II and the struggle to defeat fascism. Similarly, at a time when many of his contemporaries were apologizing for, if not celebrating, brutal regimes emerging in postcolonial states where liberation movements had thrown off an imperial yoke, Walzer insisted on holding these governments accountable for their misdeeds. Continue reading →