Razón, política y pasión lleva a cabo una crítica del liberalismo desde el interior del liberalismo mismo, pues, tal como indica su autor, parte del supuesto de que es necesaria una teoría que pueda explicar y apoyar la movilización y la solidaridad democráticas, y tal teoría, si es que es posible, ha de ser una teoría liberal. Walzer analiza la desigualdad alojada, por así decirlo, en las asociaciones involuntarias, cuya importancia rara vez reconocen las teorías liberales, la experiencia real de la desigualdad y la «energía apasionada» sin la que no es posible oponerse a las estructuras sociales y los órdenes políticos que sostienen la desigualdad.
Michael Walzer is a Jewish American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor of the political-intellectual quarterly Dissent. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation and is a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many scholarly journals
I picked this book up at a secondhand bookstore recently while I was shopping for specific political books. It looked interesting so I gave it a quick Google at saw it was on the Yale political science booklist. How could I go wrong? Even if I disagreed with points I’d still learn. I was right and reading this was a wonderful decision. This book provides powerful insight into liberal theory, the shortcomings of it and the necessary improvements. I would recommend this to anyone interested in politics, improving people’s lives through social justice or progressive thinkers (even conservatives if you like reading the other sides theory). I found it to be a short but dense (sometimes it was a bit of a grind) read that possessed many points I could easily summarize and take away from each chapter.
In "Politics and Passion," Walzer cogently defends the central principles of political liberalism while simultaneously subjecting them to the scrutiny of the communitarian critique. Walzer's use of concrete examples to explain his approach to navigating conflicting values in a pluralist democracy is easily the book's greatest strength. The primary weakness is the work's lack of originality and scholastic rigor. While it was a pleasant read, a serious student of political theory will find nothing here that wasn't already easily inferrable from Rawls or even simple observation. In short, this straightforward account of communitarian liberalism is relatively nuanced for such an accessible book.