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The Appeal of Innocence: Baldwin, Walzer, and the Bounds of Social Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Lawrie Balfour
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Extract

Racial innocence persists not only in American public life but in its democratic theory as well. An unwillingness to confront the implications of American racial history diminishes theorists' capacity to respond to the exclusion and dehumanization of African Americans in the post-civil rights era. Reading James Baldwin's social critical essays against Michael Walzer's writings on the practice of social criticism, this essay shows how a theorist whose work equips him to grapple with questions of racial injustice nonetheless evades them by constructing three sorts of boundaries: between members and nonmembers, between social critics and certain relations of power, and between the “core” of a people's experience and the brutalities of their history.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , Summer 1999 , pp. 373 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1999

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References

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2 Baldwin, James, “A Question of Identity” (1954), in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–85 (New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1985), p. 97Google Scholar. The first citation of any essay from this collection will include the original publication date in parentheses.

3 I do not mean to suggest that “racial” matters are reducible to the experiences of African Americans or to divisions between “blacks” and “whites.” While my work contests such reductions, it also maintains that the specificity of African American experiences and of the black-white line merits sustained attention.

4 See: Kinder, Donald R. and Sanders, Lynn M., Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar

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7 Within recent philosophy and political theory, there is a substantial literature that identifies innocence as an intellectual position of which to be wary. See: Dumm, Thomas, united states (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 16–17Google Scholar; Flax, Jane, Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 131–47Google Scholar; and Hampshire, Stuart, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

8 For further discussion of the phenomenon of passive injustice, see: Shklar, Judith N., The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 15–50.Google Scholar

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10 In distinguishing among three paths in moral philosophy, Walzer contends that the path of interpretation is not so much superior to the paths of discovery (for which Thomas Nagel's formulation, “the view from nowhere,” serves as a shorthand) and invention (represented by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas) as it is the only available way for human beings to reflect on moral commitments. “The moralities we discover and invent,” he observes, “always turn out, and always will turn out, remarkably similar to the morality we already have” (Walzer, Michael, Interpretation and Social Criticism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987], pp. 20–21).Google Scholar

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13 Although I will assume that social critics are both men and women, it should be noted that Walzer refers to them as “he,” and only one among his company—Simone de Beauvoir—is a woman (Ibid., p. 235).

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27 This article does not provide a comprehensive account of Walzer's political and moral thought and, in particular, says little about Walzer's most ambitious work of boundary-drawing, Spheres of Justice. While the written record—which includes works of theory and social critical essays and works that are clearly both—is too substantial to be accounted for here, I will not restrict myself to Walzer's two books on social criticism but will make use of other pieces where they illuminate aspects of these books.

28 Although my discussion focuses on the experiences of American citizens, it is informed by recent debates about Walzer's notion of membership and its implications for international obligations. See: Bader, Veit, “Citizenship and Exclusion: Radical Democracy, Community, and Justice. Or, What Is Wrong with Communitarianism?” Political Theory 23 (05 1995): 211–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Booth, William James, “Foreigners: Insiders, Outsiders and the Ethics of Membership,” Review of Politics 59 (Spring 1997): 259–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Because Walzer's work focuses on members of “political communities,” I use the words “member” and “citizen” interchangeably in this discussion. Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 31.Google Scholar

30 Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

31 Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 140Google Scholar; Walzer, , Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 59.Google Scholar

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33 Ibid., p. 78.

34 Ibid., p. 80.

35 Baldwin, , “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” (1960), in The Price of the Ticket, p. 206.Google Scholar

36 Although the particular barriers that confined Baldwin in the 1930s and 1940s may no longer exist, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton confirm that African Americans living in American cities in the half-century since World War II continue to experience historic levels of residential segregation and that such segregation is linked to a variety of forms of economic and social exclusion. The policy implications of denying the existence of such boundaries emerge in Walzer's discussion of affirmative action policies in Spheres of Justice. There Walzer explains that preferential treatment or the “reservation of office” for certain kinds of individuals “is only possible after boundaries have been drawn between members and strangers.” “In American society today, there are no such boundaries,” he avers. Moving from the assertion that only one sort of preference is justifiable to the assertion that the conditions for such a preference do not exist, Walzer overlooks the assertions of African Americans and others who testify to the robustness of the boundaries he dismisses. Further, the repetition of the word “natural” to describe the ways in which jobs are generally distributed, neighborhoods populated, and so on implies that such boundaries as do exist reflect an organic grouping of like with like (Massey, Douglas A. and Denton, Nancy A., American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]Google Scholar; Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, pp. 148–54Google Scholar [emphasis added]).

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38 Walzer, , spheres of Justice, p. 74Google Scholar (emphasis added).

39 Walzer, , The company of Critics, p. 158.Google Scholar

40 Walzer, Michael, “The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities,” in Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 58.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., p. 49.

42 Ibid., p. 51.

43 Baldwin, , “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950), in The Price of the Ticket, pp. 37–38.Google Scholar

44 See: Walzer, Michael, “Shared Meanings in a Poly-Ethnic Democratic Setting: A Response,” journal of Religious Ethics 22 (Fall 1994): 401–405.Google Scholar

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46 Walzer, , Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 60.Google Scholar

47 Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 237Google Scholar. Walzer does discuss briefly the relationship that often exists between social critics and social movements or parties. See Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 23.Google Scholar

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49 Walzer's distinction between prophet and priest owes a great deal to Max Weber, who distinguishes between the priesthood as a professional caste that wields institutional power and the prophets as an oppositional force, and who also chooses Amos over Ezekiel as a model. Walzer cites Weber's Ancient Judaism as a source throughout his discussion of “the prophet as social critic,” yet he chooses to ignore many of the attributes of Weber's prophets. Prophecy, in Weber's account, begins with a moment of personal revelation and provides a theodicy in which the answer to the “why?” of a people's misfortunes lies in God's will. While vitally concerned with social justice, the Weberian prophet becomes involved in the fate of the community for the sake of the fulfillment of divine commands; and the antagonism the prophet feels for a community gone astray evinces “culture hostility.” Walzer, by contrast, refuses Weber's account of the prophet as a demagogue or charismatic leader and dismisses the significance of divine revelation in the following footnote: “It is pointed out that Amos can speak in the name of God, whereas we can claim no such authority. This makes a difference, of course, but not of a relevant kind.” See Weber, MaxAncient Judaism, trans, and ed. Gerth, Hans H. and Martindale, Don (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952), esp. pp. 267–335Google Scholar; Economy and Society, vol. I, eds. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), esp. pp. 439–68Google Scholar; and “Politics as a Vocation,” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans, and ed. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 79–80Google Scholar. Walzer, Compare, Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 70 and p. 82, n. 15.Google Scholar

50 Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” War and Moral Responsibility, ed. Cohen, Marshall, Nagel, Thomas, and Scanlon, Thomas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 63.Google Scholar

51 Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 81.Google Scholar

52 Walzer, , “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” pp. 63–64.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., p. 76.

54 Ibid., p. 65.

55 Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 43.Google Scholar

56 The starkness of the division of the critic from any association with power is evident in a curious footnote in which Walzer writes that “the connected critic has no authority because he has no distance.” I take the footnote to mean that the critic lacks the power to enforce his or her judgments. But Walzer's claim that the “argumentative” character of the critic's judgments implies a lack of authority sits uneasily with his own account of the requirement of connection, which operates as a kind of authority. While this sort of authority is not equivalent to power over others, it can be used in the service of that sort of power (Ibid., p. 150).

57 Baldwin, , “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” (1961), in The Price of the Ticket, p. 258.Google Scholar

58 Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 238Google Scholar.

59 Walzer, , Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 75Google Scholar (emphasis added).

60 Ibid., p. 84.

61 Walzer, , The Company of Critics, p. 235.Google Scholar

62 Hook, Sidney, quoted from “Liberalism and the Negro: A Roundtable Discussion,” Commentary (03 1964): 31Google Scholar. I do not mean to offer a larger comparison between Hook and Walzer but merely to examine Hook's comment as a particularly good example of what I am trying to describe.

63 At the conclusion of “Nobody Knows My Name,” Baldwin uses language very similar to Hook's, and to Walzer's: “Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself.” This passage reflects a recurrent tension in Baldwin's thought between his opposition to self-delusion (including the delusion that Americans have ever known a “standard of freedom” worth wholehearted celebration) and his investment in an American democracy. Taken together, however, Baldwin's essays indicate that the concept of freedom is better understood as a kind of responsibility that Americans have never fully accepted than a standard to be recovered. Baldwin, , “Nobody Knows My Name” (1959), in The Price of the Ticket, p. 193.Google Scholar

64 Walzer, , Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 87.Google Scholar

65 Ibid., p. 44.

66 Ibid.

67 Walzer similarly overlooks racial meanings in his account of how the principle of equal treatment came to be recognized as part of American public life. Retelling the story of the riots of white Americans against the Conscription Act of 1863 (in which exemptions from the Civil War draft could be bought for $300), he describes the violence as “the resistance and resentment of masses of citizens that drew the line between what could be sold and what could not” and adds that “we acknowledge now the principle of equal treatment—because of the political struggles of 1863.” Although the case lends itself to a class-based analysis, the racial dimension of the story, which is not mentioned, strikes me as no less significant for Walzer's discussion of pluralism and equality. In an account of the same events, Ronald Takaki relates that the immediate target of the riots—which he also depicts as an example of working-class outrage at the privileges of the rich—was New York's African American population. The war in question was the Civil War, and Democratic politicians exploited racial animosity between Irish and black New Yorkers to fuel a race riot. In addition to burning a black orphanage, destroying black homes, and assaulting African Americans, the rioters cried, “Vengeance on every nigger in New York.” The point here is not that the story has nothing to teach about equal treatment, but that “the political struggles of 1863” offer a cautionary example of how the expansion of some citizens' rights has been intertwined with the oppression of others and a reminder of the invisibility of racial identity when the violence is the work of the “majority” (Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, pp. 98–99Google Scholar; Takaki, Ronald, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993], pp. 152–53Google Scholar).

68 Walzer, , Interpretation and Social Criticism, p. 87.Google Scholar

69 Ibid., p. 29.

70 Baldwin, , “They Can't Turn Back” (1960), in The Price of the Ticket, p. 228.Google Scholar

71 Baldwin, , “A Question of Identity,” p. 99.Google Scholar

72 Faulkner, William, quoted in Howe, Russell Warren, “A Talk with William Faulkner,” The Reporter 14 (22 03 1956): 19Google Scholar (emphasis added).

73 Faulkner, , quoted in Baldwin, , “Faulkner and Desegregation,” in The Price of the Ticket, p. 149.Google Scholar

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid., pp. 149–50.

76 Baldwin, , “Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone” (1977), in The Price of the Ticket, pp. 645–46.Google Scholar