Michael Walzer

An American philosopher and political theorist, Michael Walzer is one of the leading intellectual figures in the United States and is currently a professor emeritus at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. For three decades he served as co-editor of Dissent, one of the most renowned magazines among the American left, for which he is now editor emeritus; he has also been connected with publications such as Philosophy and Public Affairs and The New Republic. Walzer has devoted a large part of his career to analysing war from an ethical perspective. His book Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977) is a point of reference in this debate, which has continued in titles such as Arguing about War (Yale University Press, 2004) and Terrorism and Just War (Philosophia, 2006). In another line of his research, Walzer has reflected on the concept of distributive justice and social criticism in books such as Spheres of Justice (Basic Books, 1983) and Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame Press, 1994), in which he expands on the debate by introducing the question of national identities. In his book The Struggle for a Decent Politics (Yale University Press, 2023) he revisits the evolution of the “liberal” category and offers a compendium of the reflections he has developed throughout his career as a political theorist.