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| Author: Michael Walzer
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $18.95
You Save: $1.00 (5%)
Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 5509
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0465037070
Dewey Decimal Number: 355.02
EAN: 9780465037070
Publication Date: July 25, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 As a cadet at West Point, I read this in 1991 August 9, 2002
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
This book was required reading in philosophy class when I was a sophomore at West Point. I recently pulled the book out of storage to review it. Was our invasion of Afghanistan a "Just War"? Would an invasion of Iraq be a "Just War"? It covers more about war than just these topics (and not specifically these actions), and it reveals that just and unjust war/fighting is not always so easy to define.
 According to this book, Israel is always right December 1, 2002
15 out of 65 found this review helpful
Serious problems with this book include its extremely biased approach of upholding all of Israel's actions as "Just", while making all German actions of WWII look like they were connected with war crimes. Basic premise of the book is that Israeli actions are always right, German and PLO actions are completely wrong, and that the Walzer's view of things is the only valid argument in the world. Extremely biased. The victor truly does decide the justness and "unjustness" of war, and Walzer can only take the Israeli side or the anti-American side of most arguments.
Modern classic of just war theory June 14, 2001
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
No other book has created so much discussion about just war theory than this. It is really a modern classic. Book deals with two essential just war theory questions: 1) when it is morally permissible to go to war and 2) what it is morally permissible to do in war. Walzer draws many historical examples and his theory can be summarized:1) non-intervention is primary principle because nations right to self-determination must be respected. 2)Interventio to support states such right is permissible on three circumstances: a) when nation wants to make seccion out of original state and wants to create own state b) when intervention has already done and idea of new intervention is to counter original intervention effects. c)humanitarian interventio when severe and large human right violation have occured in state. Walzer's view is communitarinist: community is vital to human beings. Without community there can not be human rights. Book is easily readable and has very little or nothing philosophical jargon. I can recomment warmly this book to anyone who is interested in moral question of war.
Still relevant today (at 27 years old) December 3, 2004
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
After reading the Oct 2004 review of Seth J. Frantzman, I feel the need to answer his question of why Walzer does not deal with the question of Sept 11. The simple answer is that the book was first published in 1977. It is true that it is now in its third edition, but even the newest edition is 2000 and it is simply a reprint of the old edition with a new preface added. Granted, the reviewer is correct that Walzer focuses on Western conflicts (though again, the Iran-Iraq conflict also hadn't started yet when Walzer was writing) but I would have to say "Go with what you know." Walzer does a good job of setting the context for the situations that he does discuss.
In fact, the reviewer's comment that "THe question of 'just wars' was obviously aimed at the recent Iraq war" just makes Walzer's case for him. The fact that his text is still clearly relevant today makes his historical points that much more powerful. In our philosophy department there has been a major resurgence in teaching Walzer in the last 3 years for just this reason.
Even though Walzer's opinions on the current US-Iraqi war can be fairly clearly determined from "Just and Unjust Wars", if you want a more explicit version of what he would say, you should pick up "Arguing About War" which is Walzer's 2004 book of recent essays. He discusses the Iraq war explicitly, although books published in May are already a bit dated. Walzer's philosophical arguments are timeless though and need to be thought about and discussed.
I would highly recommend the book and recommend that the reader keep current conflicts in mind while reading the historical episodes of other conflicts to help put Walzer's arguments in perspective.
All Is Not Fair in Love and War June 16, 2006
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Walzer's historical approach to examining just war theory is, I think, the most useful way to understand morality in war. That is so because empirical facts back up all the philosophical evaluations. Walzer describes experience and draws conclusions here; he is laying a philosophical foundation and implying, if not prescribing, moral norms from which the rules have been extracted. Be forewarned, he does not cut the reader any slack. This book requires some serious attention to the author's train of thought.
Just war theory has two categories: the justice of going to war, and the justice of fighting once in a war. Walzer's discussion usefully and clearly separates the two and examines via historical events what we regard as right and wrong within each sphere. In doing this he has done the modern world a tremendous service. His logical breakdown speaks to thousands of years of tradition about what thinkers have considered right and wrong in war. One of the best outcomes of this landmark work is the complete debunking of the notion that "all is fair in love and war." That is the path of least moral resistance (or as Clausewitz would say, "friction"), yet we all know that soldiers are honored for fighting well and loathed for behaving like armed thugs and murderers. What is amazing from the discusion is the realization that Walzer knows he has to attack that age-old notion, something our collective sense of justice has historically always rejected. Yet it remains a prevailing idea for many. Originally coined by the Romans it seems (Walzer quotes them, "In war the laws are silent"), they themselves were self-consciously contrite over the fates they inflicted on the Greeks and Carthaginians. The book rates five stars for rigorously addressing this issue alone.
Some make the mistake of thinking Walzer is a pacifist--far from it. On the otherside some critics find his argument about "supreme emergency" a moral failure and a cop-out. The case of Nazi Germany is his paradigmatic case of supreme emergency, one where normal rules may be relaxed, if ever so little, because of the especially pernicious nature of state-sponsored genocide. In contrast Walzer does not see Imperial Japan, for instance, as having represented a supreme emergency, and so the atomic bombings and the fire bombings of cities could not be morally justified. Readers may want to compare his view to Paul Fussell's perspective in the essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." Walzer's argument here has lent unintended tacit support to many ideas about torturing terrorists at Gitmo and elsewhere. It's pretty obvious Dick Cheney, for instance, thinks the same relaxation of restraints would apply to Islamic terror (but the analogy seems weak). I recommend readers to Tim Challans' book Awakening Warrior for a critique of Walzer's idea of supreme emergency and a very impressive logical attack upon the recent trend toward torturing POW's in prisons outside the USA.
Significantly for current events, readers interested in the distinction between pre-emptive and preventive war will find a well articulated argument in Just and Unjust Wars. The US attack on Iraq was and still is often justified as pre-emptive. That impulse on the part of the neo-conservatives who devised or whipped up the casus belli reflects, I think, a need to cloak a morally questionable war in the robes of legitimacy. There is no way that attack can be justified under the historically accepted norms of "pre-emption." Michael Walzer's well-thought distinction between pre-emption and prevention makes sense even in the milieu of asymmetric warfare against terror and Islamic radicalism, and it clearly shows why the Iraq war was a moral mistake from the start, regardless of its practical success down the road, if we are fortunate enough to see that. The moral precedent of engaging in preventive war will continue to haunt America long into the future. The fact that Iraq was not even on the spectrum where the fine line between pre-emption and prevention exists is a telling aspect of the overall ongoing strategic fiasco. Where one fails to recognize the moral high ground, one is doomed to moral failure. Walzer was vocal about the run-up to war in 2003, and those who read his book would do well to find his comments about the Iraq invasion; they are edifying in terms of understanding the overall argument in this book and, not coincidentally, where we are going in this role as the world's police force.
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