Michael Walzer’s Moral Minimalism seems to make a series of assumptions are not only unacceptable from a social/political science point of view, but are dangerous when applied to any theories about current or past events. In particular, when he discusses his maximal meaning of morals we see him speak in generalities about the universal meanings about the signs that were being paraded through Prague or the general understanding about the immorality of totalitarian regimes, he seems to be speaking on behalf of all people everywhere across every time in a way that is blatantly overstepping his bounds as a political scientist. His evidence for the Prague demonstration is “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” (Walzer, 2). However, he gives himself room to maneuver when he says that their actual understandings of “justice” may be different. In this way, he is saying that there is a universal meaning based on a shared set of morals, but there is no way to pin down exactly what that meaning is. This is similar to Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis where the author states that we are coming to the end of history and that there are no new ideas, but at the same time, he does not say when the end of history and some great convergence will actually occur.

On a more personal, and albeit biased, note, the idea of universal morals does not make sense to me as a whole. Even such fundamental moral rules in Western culture such as not taking the life of another human being (which Walzer addresses) are not a universal moral by which all humans abide as there are plenty of instances of ritual sacrifices or the killing of newborns that are part of the culture of other societies. With cases like these, the idea of a universal moral that we all understand is difficult to reconcile.