A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Minority religious practices and prohibitions, beyond association and worship, are tolerated or not depending on their visibility or notoriety and the degree of outrage they arouse in the majority.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

One reason that toleration works so easily in countries in the United States is that the churches and congregations that individuals form, whatever their theological disagreements, are, mostly, very much like each other.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Intolerance is commonly most virulent when differences of culture, ethnicity, or race coincide with class differences - whence the members of minority groups are also economically subordinated.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Sometimes, indeed, toleration works best when relations of political superiority and inferiority are clearly marked and commonly recognized.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

No group in an immigrant society is allowed to organize itself coercively, to seize control of public space, or to monopolize public resources.  Every form of corporatism is ruled out.  In principle, the public schools teach the history and "civics" of the state, which is conceived to have no national but only a political identity.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

In time of war, the loyalty of national minorities to the nation state ... will readily be called into doubt.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

... though the nation-state may be less tolerant of groups, it may well force groups to be more tolerant of individuals.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Toleration in nation-states is commonly focused not on groups but on their individual participants, who are generally conceived stereotypically, first as citizens, then as members of this or that minority.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Among histories and cultures, the nation-state is not neutral; its political apparatus is an engine for national reproduction.  National groups seek statehood precisely in order to control the means of reproduction.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

Updates 2012-02-20

• I was interviewed for a brief part in a San Francisco Chronicle story, regarding an incident online a few years ago.
• My Spring 2012 semester at SJSU, the last undergraduate one, has begun, with Senior Seminar / Honors Thesis, Local Government and Politics, Modern Political Thought, and an Independent Study project focusing on international relations' realism.
• I'm still waiting to hear back from CUNY and UC Riverside in the U.S., Oxford and Univ. College London in the UK.
• I am now a published author on Amazon, where copies of my Bibliography can be acquired.  Unless published in an academic journal, all future pieces will be published, in digital and in print, exclusively through Amazon, until further notice.
• I'm working on a late-stage revision of my Modern America: The End of Political Discourse and Social Cohesion treatise, which will be followed by a revision of my exegesis project on political education and society.  Both will be published in the near future.
• My reading list, as of late, organized alphabetically:
• Terry Christensen and Tom Hogen-Esch's Local Politics: A Practical Guide to Governing at the Grassroots (2006)
• Tom Clark's Jack Kerouac: A Biography (1984)
• Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1668)
• Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs (2011)
• John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1689)*
• Juan Linz and Alfred Steppan's Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996) [selections]
• articles:
• Peter Burnham's "Towards a Political Theory of Crisis: Policy and Resistance across Europe" (2011)
• Damien Cahill's "Beyond Neoliberalism? Crisis and the Prospects for Progressive Alternatives" (2011)
• William Niemi and David J. Plante's "The Great Recession, Liberalism, and the Meaning of the New Deal" (2011)
• Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler's "A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States" (2011)
• Janet Spitz's "Intentioned Recession: An Ideologically Driven Re-Structuring" (2011)

* not for the first time

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

But sovereignty also has limits ... Acts or practices that "shock the conscience of humankind" are, in principle, not tolerated.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Toleration is an essential feature of sovereignty and an important reason for its desirability.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

... international society is not anarchic; it is a very weak regime, but it is tolerant as a regime despite the intolerance of some of the states that make it up.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Imperial rule is historically the most successful way of incorporating difference and facilitating (requiring is more accurate) peaceful coexistence.  But it isn't, or at least it never has been, a liberal or democratic way.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Nor is it intolerant of difference to ban a programmatically antidemocratic party from participating in democratic elections; it is merely prudent.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

The forms of coexistence have never been more widely debated than they are today, because the immediacy of difference, the everyday encounter with otherness, has never been so widely experienced.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer

Tolerating and being tolerated is a little like Aristotle's ruling and being ruled:  it is the work of democratic citizens.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

It is clear, then, that there are branches of learning and education we must study with a view to the enjoyment of leisure, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

No state can exist not having the necessary offices, and no state can be well administered not having the offices which tend to preserve harmony and good order.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

The mere establishment of a democracy is not the only or principal business of the legislator, or of those who wish to create such a state, for any state, however badly constituted, may last one, two, or three days; a far greater difficulty is the preservation of it.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

... that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

... honours should be given by law to magistrates who have the reputation of being incorruptible.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

In the first place, men should guard against the beginning of change, and in the second place they should not rely upon the political devices ... invented only to deceive the people, for they are proved by experience to be useless.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

Revolutions in democracies are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues, who either in their private capacity lay information against rich men until they compel them to combine (for a common danger unites even the bitterest enemies), or coming forward in public they stir up the people against them.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not the growth of a day, neither is it a multitude brought together by accident.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

... the revolution may be accomplished by small degrees ...

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

Political revolutions also spring from a disproportionate increase in any part of the state. ... When the rich grow numerous or properties increase, the form of government changes into an oligarchy or a government of families.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

For if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.  And since the people are the majority, and the opinion of the majority is decisive, such a government must necessarily be a democracy.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

It is often supposed that there is only one kind of democracy and one of oligarchy.  But this is a mistake...

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)

A Word from Aristotle, Ctd.

Any change of government which has to be introduced should be one which men will be both willing and able to adopt, since there is quite as much trouble in the reformation of an old constitution as in the establishment of a new one, just as to unlearn is as hard as to learn.

from Aristotle's Politics (4th century B.C.E.)