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“... Michael Walzer is one of America’s leading social critics, an editor of the magazine Dissent and the author of such books of political philosophy as Spheres of Justice, a systematic discussion of the nature of justice in society. In The Company of Critics he steps back from the activity of social criticism to reflect on the work of a number of other 20th-century social critics ...”

“... A number of recent writers have suggested in various ways that it has. Two stimulating books by Michael Walzer and by Stuart Hampshire make distinctive contributions to this debate. Both are more personal than most books in moral philosophy, and each gives the clear sense of an author working to understand and articulate values about which he cares ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life ...”

“... in general, specialists on democracy in our part of the globe in particular, PhD students, Michael Walzer fans, Thomas Jefferson fans etc. The civilian casualties were hardly mentioned, as in the US, though our media are not quite as bad as theirs. We were never shown the ‘disturbing pictures’. Instead, every evening Israelis could watch the ...”

“... in 1982, in his book Why We Were in Vietnam, on two editors of Dissent: the political theorist Michael Walzer and the literary and social critic Irving Howe. Though the attack on these two occurs in the Trilling chapter, it has no direct connection with any strains in his relationship with the Trillings. He had known in the early Seventies that both ...”

“... regimes be considered illegitimate or unacceptable? This is one of the questions raised here by Michael Walzer. Edward Said suggests that Foucault would have been more convincing if he had made a distinction between submitting to a power and following a social convention. In Deleuze’s analysis, the microphysicist of power need not address the ...”

“... showing how Protestant ideals influenced the middle-class constitutionalism of Opposition MPs. Michael Walzer went further in his Revolution of the Saints by arguing that Calvinism was a modernising ideology. With breathtaking audacity, he leapt from case-studies of Marian exiles to New Model soldiers belting out battle hymns, in pursuit of his thesis ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained ...”

“... over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a ...”

“... of collective passions in the interests of mass slaughter. When one hears philosophers like Michael Walzer or columnists like Anthony Lewis proclaim this as a ‘just war’, one realises once more that words are the first casualty in any ...”

“... which thereby excluded the mass killings of Stalin and Pol Pot, has been criticised by many. Michael Mann chooses to call such massacres ‘classicide’ or ‘politicide’, and reserves ‘genocide’ for the destruction of ethnic or religious groups. Mark Levene, on the other hand, includes all of these within his definition of genocide as ‘the ...”

“... exhorted, ‘Think harder. Get it right. (Why are liberals so afraid of their own philosophy?)’ Michael Walzer, co-editor of Dissent, recently issued a call to arms against radical Islam even though the US has already helped ignite wars in several Muslim countries: ‘So here I am, a writer, not a fighter,’ he urged, ‘and the most helpful thing I ...”

“... doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak ...”

“... an affair with the economist Thomas Balogh, who dropped her for Murdoch, who was involved with Michael Foot, an intelligence officer (the military historian M.R.D. Foot, not the politician). At Balogh’s insistence, Murdoch broke up with Michael, who found comfort with Philippa; they were married after the war, from ...”