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Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations was first published a little over 35 years ago. It is worth your while to take a look at the first edition - if you have one, hold on to it fast: you are in possession of a veritable collector's item.
Few scholarly works can claim to have shaped the moral convictions of a generation, but Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars is one of them. And it is likely to remain an intellectual and ethical beacon for generations to come.
When the book first appeared, in 1977, America was still reeling from the bloody war in Vietnam. War in Korea was a recent event, and World War II was still fresh in people's minds. Yet few American scholars outside the military or the Catholic establishment were interested in Just War theory. Walzer's book made the subject popular again, inviting political and moral engagement by everyday readers. The book received a further boost of popularity when it became required reading for every officer entering West Point's doors.
At first glance, the status that the work obtained and retained is far from obvious. Our current world of warfare is very different from the one which emerges from the book's pages. Human suffering in war, indeed, remains the same. But the manner in which war was executed in times past might seem to us today, at least in some respects, as the stuff of history textbooks.
Walzer's book was predicated on the "classical" war - brought to its terrifying apotheosis in World �
