With characteristic elegance, clarity, and nuance, Michael Walzer here refines and extends the thesis he first ventured 15 years ago that the fragmentary effects of liberalism require periodic communitarian correction. Nearly all of the chapters are revised from previous articles or book chapters composed in the years intervening, and so their relation is more thematic than structural. But their collective force is considerable.

Against the contract tradition of autonomous individuals freely choosing their associations, Walzer develops the extent to which our identity is constituted, inevitably and often beneficently, by associations that are entirely, primarily, or initially involuntary—gender, family, race, ethnicity, religion, and culture. Against interventionist liberals, such as Stephen Macedo, who seek to instill liberal values pervasively in civil society, Walzer defends toleration and even cautious subsidization of illiberal “totalizing communities,” such as fundamentalist and ultraorthodox religious groups or indigenous ethnic groups; only when their practices “radically curtail” the life chances of their members or “limit the responsibilities of citizenship” should the state intervene (pp. 85–86). Against theorists of “deliberative democracy,” such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Walzer expands our appreciation of the range of actions that legitimately shape public policy (and in which actual deliberation forms only an incidental role); extends reciprocity not only to individuals who are “rational in exactly the same way we are” but also to “members of groups with beliefs and interests that mean as much to them as our beliefs and interests mean to us” (p. 104); and embraces passion (especially for recognition in the politics of identity) as not only a powerful but also a legitimate aspect of political participation.

This communitarian corrective was his first motive, but in writing Politics and Passion, Walzer reports, he became “increasingly engrossed” with the implications of these correctives for the “struggle against inequality” (p. xi) and the recognition that not all “communities” are egalitarian. Thus, he considers the involuntary associations not only in the way they shape our understandings of the good life and the blessings of liberty, but also in how their internal structures and their power alignments with each other implicate equality. He balances his tolerance of totalizing communities with a concern that their members become capable citizens in the larger body politic. In making room for the passionate indignation of the pariah groups—their desire “not to be dominated”—he recognizes that he also risks engaging the “desire to dominate” (p. 122). Communitarian and multicultural sympathies, he recognizes, do not always mesh easily with social democracy. In the one chapter freshly composed for this book, “The Collectivism of the Powerless,” Walzer provides his most sustained effort to synthesize these sometimes competing commitments. In a society with differential power among its ethnic or cultural groups, such as our own, the only effective way to achieve equality is through group empowerment of the weak or stigmatized—possible, he argues, only with assistance from the state—enabling them to provide their members with life-cycle services (child care, education, health, retirement) and rite-of-passage celebrations. Thus, we should aspire to a political system with power radically dispersed not only through separation of powers and federalism, but also through a multitude of ethnic and other groupings providing life cycle services—what he calls, “meat and potatoes multiculturalism” (p. 38)—with the ideal result that individual citizens will hold “identical 1/n shares” of political power. This, he argues, is “a picture to be admired and a plan that we should try to realize” (pp. 42–43).

Walzer writes with such warm sympathies to his various interlocutors—multiculturalists, liberals, social democrats—that it is sometimes difficult to determine just where he stands. Except that he faces Left. To the Right, he turns his back. This is unfortunate on several grounds. It is unfortunate for political practice because he fails to explore the areas where there may be common ground. Why not the “faith-based initiative” to assist in the provision of life-cycle services? Why not school vouchers to empower groups that wish to pursue a distinctive curriculum? Why not a “thousand points of light” to spur local initiatives? It is unfortunate empirically, for many of his claims are mere assertions. Is it really true that disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups can only progress through state-sponsored, race- and ethnic-conscious programs? The vast work of Thomas Sowell receives no notice. Should we really regard the Wagner Act and the closed shop (repeatedly invoked, pp. 78, 97, 134, 157, 168 n. 9) as the model for state-assisted group empowerment? The decline of the unionized North, the rise of the nonunionized South and Southwest, the relative impact on wages of unions versus growing productivity spurred by competitive enterprises, the impact of unions on unemployment and outsourcing of jobs—none of these concerns is explored. And it is unfortunate for political philosophy, as he never makes the comparative case for his vision of what equality requires. Why should we prefer a polity where each has “1/n” of power to one in which all of us would be better off, but some more so than others? Why should the Rousseauian vision of each citizen with “1/n” of political power be our dream rather than our nightmare? Rousseau after all argues that a polity approximating this ideal would have to be molded by a singular Lawgiver, fostered with rigorous attention to education and mores by censors, and preserved through sworn belief to a civil religion. Identical equal shares of power among the citizens can only be maintained with powerful central authority, vigilantly redistributing power whenever one citizen gets more than his or her allotted share. Why not equality of natural rights, the equality of each of us, as Lincoln said, to eat the bread that his hand earns? Why not equality of opportunity, which allows excellence to flourish without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity?

All of this neglect is unfortunate, but not surprising, for in the diverse and multicultural universe of higher education, conservatives are probably the least empowered.