Introduction
Walzer, Michael
More people are working at political theory in the academic world than ever before. The field is thriving, perhaps because there is so little serious thinking and arguing about politics outside...
...These tendencies suggest some reason for hope—as I think the following brief essays will indicate...
...M.W...
...This is true even of feminism, which one would expect to have significant resonance off-campus...
...The tribulations of academic Marxism are sketched by David Plotke, who also provides a program for its future...
...Seyla Benhabib describes and interprets the debates among feminist political theorists and argues herself for a position short of postmodernism— a position that would lie close to those of our other authors...
...What the reports suggest is a series of convergences: between liberals and socialists, Marxists and pluralists, defenders of community and defenders of individual autonomy...
...The result, very often, is endless refinement, esoteric jargon, romantic posturing, and fierce intramural polemic...
...Nonetheless, interesting work gets done, and if some of it is written in code, it is still possible to detect certain tendencies that may one day have practical impact...
...The neoconservative think tanks of the 1970s and early 1980s provide the only recent example of the unity of theory and practice...
...Leftist and even liberal arguments these days are largely theoretical in character: professors writing for other professors...
...Alan Ryan writes critically about communitarian theories but ends with a quiet communitarianism of his own...
...I asked each of the authors to write a "report from the field" aimed at lay readers, a report not merely descriptive but also critical, opinionated, partisan...
...Without that resonance, political theory is a kind of alienated politics, an enterprise carried on at some distance from the activities to which it refers...
...SUMMER • 1989 • 337...
...No doubt a different set of authors would have drawn a different picture, for there are still unreconstructed Marxists and radical libertarians at work in political theory—and a variety of "postmodernist" writers who cast doubt on the stability of any possible political commitment...
...The field is thriving, perhaps because there is so little serious thinking and arguing about politics outside the academy...
...Amy Gutmann's essay provides a sympathetic account of Rawls's impact on political thought...
...The rest of the essays follow in what I hope is a plausible order...
...Sanford Levinson suggests the valuable role that the Critical Legal Studies movement has played within law schools but worries that it points to no form of political or even legal practice...
...In any case, the convergences are real, and a renewed sense of the value of liberal and social democracy is their single most important cause...
...Don Herzog reports on a kind of liberalism with which democratic socialists might well feel strong affinities...
...Different versions of conservatism, unrepresented here, are still strongly present, though their strength seems to have fallen off in the course of the Reagan years (not without reason...
...This sense is perhaps best reflected in John Rawls's theory of justice, the moral influence of which has outlasted strong attacks on its underlying philosophical apparatus...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
