The Needs of Strangers/Exodus and Revolution
McWilliams, Wilson Carey
Books: THE FUTURE IN OUR PAST IN Plato's Laws, it is an Athenian stranger who teaches that friendship is the standard for the best political society, but modern states, Michael Ignatieff...
...The great value of Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution lies in its evocation of ancient speech...
...And, THE NEEDS OF STRANGERS Michael IgnatiefT Viking, $14.95, 156 pp...
...Wilson Carey McWilliams through an interpretation of King Lear, Ignatieff points out that no politics can completely satisfy human need because love, even in the best of regimes, cannot be made into a political or social right...
...So long as human beings yearn for mastery and for freedom from restraint, no land flows with milk and honey...
...A modern state may recognize our humanity—humane compassion is probably its highest virtue—but it cannot know us as individuals...
...This decisively modern view, however, makes a hash out of much of Ignatieff s argument...
...In this sense, of course, a righteous community cannot be fully or finally attained...
...Nevertheless, Ignatieff s book reminds us that modern regimes cannot ignore the human need for fraternity and the political need for civic solidarity, just as secular society, while not a church, must make room for the demands of the spirit...
...Israel is not broken by slavery...
...Commonweal: 380...
...citizens will not be friends, and our politics is suited to gentle decencies rather than high excellences...
...it tells me that I matter as a human being, but not as myself...
...We help and are helped by other citizens, unknown to us, only through the mediation of other strangers, the state officials who interpret and administer the laws...
...In this sense, Exodus is part of the tradition of ancient utopianism, which presumed that the best state must be possible — even if wildly improbable — within the world as we know it...
...As a political teaching, Walzer points out, Exodus describes liberation, redemption, and the founding of a better society within the limits of this world...
...Revolution, consequently, is a turning not a transformation...
...Yet political speech reduced to that level ignores our needs for collectivity, for dignity, love, and fraternity...
...At the same time, Walzer notes, the text makes clear that desolation and force are not sufficient teachers...
...The Decalogue commands a kind of soul as well as a kind of action, and we cannot eradicate our self-centeredness or REVIEWERS WILSON CAREY McWiLUAMS leaches political science at Livingston College, Rutgers University...
...We dare not let our political language catch up with modernity, lest we forget that modernity is not enough...
...Modern utopianism, on the other hand, presumes the mastery or overcoming of nature, the conquest of necessity by freedom...
...Exodus, in short, contends that the best society depends on a miracle — the Greeks would have preferred to call it good fortune — a juxtaposition of events and qualities which human prudence cannot produce or guarantee...
...There is an anachronism here and there, but Walzer recognizes that the story is designed to teach, and in fact, that it is a story about political teaching and learning, intended for "public reading and rereading...
...Margaret Susan Thompson, an assistant professor of history at Syracuse University, is working on a book about American nuns and social change to be published by Oxford University Press...
...When Ignatieff speaks most powerfully, it is in the language of what is humanly true and best, and his argument points, if only implicitly, toward a theoretical best politics, wise about human need...
...He appreciates that in such a text, intended to be timeless, the authors — or the divine Author — could not exert "close control" over meaning but managed, nevertheless, to produce a "coherent narrative" through "literary artfulness...
...Yet despite Ignatieff's graceful prose and his fine sympathies, his argument has its own tragic flaw...
...Walzer begins, in other words, with the conviction that Exodus has something important to teach us, not only about our cultural history but about political life...
...Moreover, Israel has the benefit of a great teacher, Moses, who knows that his successors must be the many and not the few...
...our envy: "I had not known sin, except the Law said, 'Thou shalt not covet.' " The promised land, as Walzer observes, is forever a standard to be striven for and approximated, but never securely possessed...
...Books: THE FUTURE IN OUR PAST IN Plato's Laws, it is an Athenian stranger who teaches that friendship is the standard for the best political society, but modern states, Michael Ignatieff reminds us, are composed of strangers...
...Exodus suggests that civic freedom is a hard discipline, to be learned only through travail and by force...
...In modern politics, estrangement is the rule...
...it is a stiff-necked people, recalcitrant but with a kind of spiritedness and dignity, resilient in the face of adversity and capable of learning from it...
...As Ignatieff observes, the ' 'vision of the classical polis" in many ways beckons us "backwards . . . into the future...
...Walzer sets Exodus against the prophetic vision of a transformed world, a "new earth" in which the promise would be achieved in a new and exalted form...
...History, however, restricts the arbitrariness of these choices, establishing a synthesis between biological nature and humanity...
...Egyptian bondage taught Israel the habits of slaves along Commonweal: 378 with the yearning for liberty, and it takes the wilderness — the new "school of the soul" — to accustom Israel to law and responsibility, the "bondage of freedom...
...Ignatieff s book is a plea to rearticulate those needs, in part so that we may better appreciate the limits and the modest virtues of modern political life...
...Even smaller states are shaped by the massive impersonalities of international economics and politics...
...A modern state is not & polis...
...And Walzer's splendid Exodus and Revolution helps indicate the continuing vitality of the ancient conviction that politics within the limits of nature has its own dignity and glory...
...As Ignatieff indicates, modern political thought scales political speech down to material needs and individual rights because such language sits comfortably with modern politics: it is universal and abstract, requiring no knowledge of persons or their relationships...
...Being human is a second nature which history taught us," and hence, there is no ' 'eternally valid account of what it means to be human...
...Discussing Augustine and Hume, Ignatieff develops a similar argument in relation to secular freedom: liberal regimes expand our freedom of choice, but this liberation in practice also implies public agnosticism in thought, or at least, an unwillingness to specify the best choice...
...He is the author of The Idea of Fraternity in America...
...Modern messianism fuses the activism of Exodus with the apocalyptic vision through its belief in the power of science to make, rather than wait for, the new earth...
...It is for that reason that Walzer is sometimes inclined to read the apocalyptic tradition as a kind of transition from Exodus toward modern utopianism...
...EZODDS AND REVOLUTION Michael Walzer Basic Books, $15.95, 192 pp...
...The promised land, as Walzer indicates, is conditional on the character of the people as well as the land...
...The "deeper argument" of Exodus is that righteousness, the sense of "positive equality," is more important than material abundance...
...Our specifically human needs are not natural, but the results of "some set of choices about what it means to be human...
...Ignatieff maintains that "human nature is historical," by which he means that we must separate our nature- equated with our biology— from our humanity, a "second nature" which results from conventions and institutions of human making...
...Our language," Ignatieff writes, ' 'has not caught up with modernity,'' but much of The Needs of Strangers proves that modern practice needs the correction of ancient speech and theory...
...Our civic duties and our due are both radically impersonal, at best a rough justice in which "We are responsible for each other but we are not responsible to each other...
...PAUL MARX is a professor of English at the University of New Haven in Connecticut...
...Good social democrat that he is, Walzer hates modern political messianism, and he uses Exodus to carry on his old quarrel with Leninist totalitarianism...
...The promised land presumes a people capable of restraining its urge to dominion (including, although Walzer does not say so, its urge to dominate nature...
...Exodus's best regime, the Covenant, presumes a public committed to justice...
...Modern politics has a tragic dimension which is not the fault of this or that regime but inherent in the thing itself...
...Modern utopianism, as both Ignatieff and Walzer remind us, is a failed creed, its wreckage all around us and in our lives...
...Walzer has a very contemporary purpose in turning to Exodus, but he respects the text on its own terms...
...The more it advances equality, the more it outrages my dignity...
...At crucial points, Ignatieff speaks ahistorically, referring to the human condition as such rather than the condition of human beings in this or that time and place...
...But, as Walzer knows, the 21 June 1985: 379 prophets presumed that the new earth must be wrought by God, and that its promise reflects God's love, not human achievement...
...Secular freedom is at odds with moral security, liberation with consolation...
...For example, King Lear is said to help teach us that "There is no such thing as love of the human race, only the love of this person for that . . ." Or, the Enlightenment "diminished the tragic dimension of human needing" by ignoring "the facts of our situation which no amount of social engineering can hope to change...
Vol. 112 • June 1985 • No. 12
