The Politics of Humanity

people marching on the streets of Prague during the Velvet Revolution, brandishing
placards bearing simple slogans such as “Truth” and “Justice”. Walzer unpacks the
implications of this image, asking himself what he can and cannot understand in it.
He notes that he does not know if he shares the same philosophical perspective on
“Truth” as the marchers. Probably they do not agree amongst themselves. “Truth”
and “Justice” will mean very different things to atheists and Christians marching
side by side.^69 The important point is that that particular epistemological debate is
irrelevant for the political purpose at hand. Walzer can understand that the
marchers mean by “Truth” that they do not wish to be lied to or deceived any more.
Similarly, without any agreement on theories of “Justice”, Walzer understands from
that placard that he is able to empathise and express solidarity with the marchers’
dislike of their totalitarian regime. He writes:

What they meant by the “justice” inscribed on their signs, however, was

simple enough: an end to arbitrary arrests, equal and impartial law

enforcement, the abolition of the privileges and prerogatives of the party

elite – common, garden variety justice.^70

By “common, garden variety justice”, Walzer is not arguing that there is necessarily
an exact account of such a thing that could be agreed on between him and the
marchers, merely that they have a shared understanding, and that he rejects the
implication that because he cannot assert full agreement with the Prague marchers,
he must necessarily fully commit to a relativistic disengagement, or post-modern
ironism, something that neither he nor the marchers would see as a desirable
outcome. “Minimalism is not foundational: it is not the case that different groups
of people discover that they are all committed to the same set of ultimate values.”^71
In short, he asserts both the fallibility of our moral judgments, and the necessity of
making them. Walzer’s internationalism derives from his commitment to his
conception of moral minimalism, the importance of which “lies in the encounter it

69
70 Walzer, Thick and Thin , 18.
71 Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 18.