In 1958, André Malraux asked Jawaharlal Nehru—nationalist and first prime minister of India—what was the most difficult task after independence. Nehru replied, “creating a just state by just means … perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious country.” In his new book, Michael Walzer argues that “leaders and militants of secular liberation” fail to consolidate their achievements and sustain secular liberationist principles because they refuse to engage religious orthodoxy and traditionalism in a productive manner. Roughly 20 to 30 years after secular revolutions, traditionalists reverse liberationist accomplishments in what Walzer terms “the paradox of liberation.” Offering Israel, India, and Algeria as examples, he insists that collaborating with orthodox and traditionalist leaders might have yielded more sustained and accepted liberal principles and practices than insisting on cosmopolitan Enlightenment norms—particularly for the status of women.

Rather than exalting in the existing nation minus its colonial structure, secular liberation struggles against the authoritarianism and passivity fostered by colonial subservience and accommodation. One of the primary roles of secular liberators is to prepare a politically passive people for independence and political awakening (pp. 2–4, 12). For example, Walzer argues that Zionists sought to refashion a weak, frightened, submissive people with a slave mentality into a proud, beautiful, and powerful citizenry capable of resistance and support for gender equality (pp. 44–47, 49). Secular leaders love “their people” but hate their “backwardness, ignorance, passivity, and submissiveness.” The leaders feel entitled to force the people to overcome or modernize their traditional beliefs and practices (p. 68). Thus, the egalitarian values of secular liberation are in perpetual tension with the elitist method. Because national liberation often comes before the liberated people are deemed by their liberators to be “politically fit” for self-rule, religion supplies a useful short-term strategy for “sustaining the unity of the anticolonial struggle” (p. 24). In the case of Israel, Zionists split on whether Judaism—as a common tradition of the majority—could be harnessed as a unifying force or whether it should be repudiated as a disempowering way of life rooted in diaspora and domination (43–48).

Walzer warns that forcing people to be free through a radical cultural negation paradoxically empowers traditional norms and practices. In the postrevolutionary setting, religious men and women enter the newly created public domain in numbers that greatly exceed the “tiny upper crust” of secularists that leads the national movement (p. 27, quoting Rajeev Bhargava, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy, 2010). Resentment of elite secular norms by the religious majority that comprises the young nation encourages construction of a fetishized (often fictional) traditional past to be restored. Citizens of the new state (like the Marranos who secretly practiced Judaism while publically worshipping as Christians in fifteenth-century Iberia) may never be refashioned into the modern, secular, liberal democratic citizens—the “new men and women”—that David Ben-Gurion and Franz Fanon celebrate. Instead, those marginalized by the secular liberationist movement retain an allegiance to “something more like the traditional, pre-state community” that, after a period of suppression by revolutionary elites, ultimately manifests itself as a counterrevolution grounded in militant religious nationalism: Islamic radicalism in Algeria, Hindutva in India, and Jewish zealotry in Israel (p. 56). Unintentionally and paradoxically, liberationist movements create “an underground culture, a secret traditionalism nourished by memory, carried by the family, sustained in conventicles and life-cycle ceremonies” (p. 55).

In order to avoid the extremism of religious revival, Walzer recommends a critical engagement in which both secular liberation and religion are strengthened and transformed. Rather than relying upon a fixed Enlightenment “Archimedean point,” liberationists can negotiate the extent to which secularism is imposed (pp. 110, 116–17). Because many religious traditions are “more capacious than fundamentalist adherents allow,” liberation can take into account some part of the nation’s past—fashioning a “set of beliefs and practices” that are “new but also familiar” (p. 119, quoting Uma Narayan’s Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, 1997, and p. 32). Compromise and critical engagement with the traditional culture and/or religion create a civic space for principles and practices that the people accept as markers of stability and continuity, rather than the dislocation of forced secularism. Negotiated secularism disarms the dangerous boast that all “good modern ideas come from the historically advanced countries of the West” (p. 118). Using the work of Amartya Sen, Walzer claims that “it may well be true that the best arguments for gender justice and for democratic pluralism are secular and philosophical in character. But philosophy doesn’t rule the day here; the best moral and political arguments are ones that derive from or connect with the inherited culture of the people who need to be convinced” (pp. 117–18, based on Sen, “Democracy and Its Global Roots: Why Democratization Is Not the Same as Westernization,” New Republic 229, October 6, 2003, 28–35).

The most interesting example of negotiated secularism that Walzer offers regards the status of women. Although “gender equality poses the greatest challenge to traditional religion and is probably the most important cause of revivalist zealotry” in his three cases, Walzer makes the case for naturalized feminisms grounded in national narratives and religious traditions (pp. 115, 119, quoting extensively from Narayan’s Dislocating Cultures). Just as secularism in the West “derives from a political negotiation with Protestant Christianity,” so Hindu and Muslim versions of secular, democratic, egalitarian, and feminist doctrines might be developed (p. 118). Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) called for a liberal cosmopolitan embrace (“As a woman I want no country. … [M]y country is the whole world”), but Walzer concludes in favor of a unique negotiated feminism in each nation (pp. 120–25, 131). His use of musical analogies (p. 121) and call for a seemingly infinite array of norms and practices is reminiscent of Aristotle’s insistence on plethos as the source of infinite mixed regimes. This reader would have welcomed an exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of such a position.

Walzer briefly considers Marxist and postcolonial critiques that view secular liberalism and religion as “equally parochial and exclusive” because they create “others” who are “excluded from the nation, treated as enemies, feared and hated” (p. 75). Rather than challenging “monolithic and exclusive religions that foster zealotry,” liberationist regimes co-opt and redirect that disciplinary power to their own nationalist enterprises. Although Walzer concedes that the Marxist vision of a universalist workers’ state is “perhaps the most authentic representation of secularism and enlightenment,” he rejects a cosmopolitan mobilization of the oppressed that he insists has never succeeded in favor of the “qualified successes” of liberationist movements (pp. 85–89).

Political theorists’ arguments are strengthened by linkage to modern or historical evidence, but Walzer fails to provide convincing case studies. India provides a nuanced and solid case for the paradox of liberation, but Algeria remains unconvincing by Walzer’s own definition of secular liberation (individual freedom, equal citizenship, scientific education, general knowledge, protection of minorities, human rights, economic and material advance, separation of church and state, inclusiveness, and rule of law; pp. 7–8, 125, 127, 93–94, 112, 99–101), and he acknowledges the openly authoritarian and nonsecular elements in the Algerian revolution (p. xii). More problematic, Walzer defines the paradox of liberalism based on an outlier case—Zionism in Israel—in which diasporic Jews immigrated to Israel based on a biblical claim to a sacred geography. While his analysis of exilic politics (defined by deference to Gentile rule in the diaspora and deferred hope for divine redemption) is interesting, he fails to demonstrate that the Zionist case can be applied to liberationist movements that fit the model of indigenous rejection of alien colonial rule. He does not address the paradoxes and complexities inherent in a Jewish Zionist liberation struggle that was itself experienced as a colonial intrusion by the indigenous Palestinians. While in the precolonial and colonial eras Indians and Algerians did not share a collective sense of national identity, they were not, in the manner of diaspora Jews, a “religion of exile.” As a result, the dynamics of colonization in Israel do not adequately illuminate the destruction of local traditions in India and Algeria by the British and the French.

Walzer insists that the three case studies are not fully representative or paradigmatic, but he maintains that events, regimes, and processes are similar enough to provide opportunities for insights (pp. ix–xiii). The problem is not (as the author claims, comparing his work to Perry Anderson’s; p. 76) the inability to provide sufficient examples but with his research and evidence. Walzer has strategically picked cases to bolster his predetermined, generalized theory, rather than examine cases that allow him to observe a paradox of liberation. He notes that Zionist, Indian, and Algerian leaders who tried to negotiate more with religious leaders failed, yet he pushes ahead with a call for liberationists to “acknowledge the substantive seriousness and strength of their traditionalist opponents and begin a process of engagement and negotiation with them” (p. 70). A more convincing argument might define the paradox using the case of India, rather than support the supposed benefits of negotiated secularism by analyzing cases that meet the liberationist criteria—including at least one nation in which negotiated secularism laid the groundwork for a successful liberal regime.

Walzer’s postscript on the United States treats another exceptional case: Self-selecting emigrants with roots in the common law, nascent liberalism, and capitalism claim land occupied by native peoples. As in the case of Israel, Walzer offers no insights into the power dynamics and violence inherent to those mass relocations that were simultaneously colonial (for the native peoples) and liberationist (for the transplanted Europeans). Nor does he contrast the “success” of American colonists’ demographic engulfment and near annihilation of the continent’s indigenous natives with the demographic realities of his other historical examples. Today there exists a demographic stalemate—virtual equilibrium between the Israeli Jewish and ethic Palestinian populations—while the cases of India and Algeria resulted in near-total ejection of resident populations of European ancestry in, respectively, 1947 and 1962.

A more focused American case study—for example, equal access to state-sanctioned marriage—might demonstrate that many regimes grapple with the tension between traditional religion and inequality. William Eskridge, Jr., demonstrates how pursuit of pure, Rawlsian principles of justice led to backlash and the empowerment of traditionalists (Equality Practice: Civil Unions and the Future of Gay Rights, 2001). Like Walzer, Eskridge calls for a politics of engagement with traditionalists, but he is more upfront about his aim to change community standards over time. Does negotiated liberation reflect Walzer’s sincere respect for traditional beliefs as potential sources of insight and liberation, or his strategic hope for a more efficient, politically palatable way to secure secular liberation? The Paradox of Liberation raises interesting questions, rather than supplying well-evidenced or convincing answers.