The Company Of Critics

Political philosopher Michael Walzer’s seminal account of social critics and criticism of the twentieth century.

“This book proves again that Michael Walzer is a writer of rare elegance, intellectual range and moral seriousness.” —New York Times

From Diogenes to Nietzsche, the ideal social critic has long been imagined as an outsider, the dissenting intellectual who must break with society to correctly diagnose its flaws. In this classic text, Michael Walzer upends that tradition by showing that the most effective social critics are those who remain deeply embedded in their own communities, appealing to their shared values while working to improve everyone’s lives. But as Walzer also reveals, remaining a part of the community while telling it hard truths is incredibly difficult work. Through portraits of eleven major twentieth-century figures—from Simone de Beauvoir to George Orwell, Albert Camus to Michel Foucault—he shows what this difficult balance looks like in practice, and what happens when critics have lost it. Ranging across ideologies and continents, The Company of Critics offers a powerful vision of what social criticism should be in the twenty-first century.