Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics

Michael Walzer draws on his extensive engagement in the civil rights & antiwar movements of the 1960s to lay out the practical steps necessary to keep movement politics alive both in victory & in defeat. What do people need to do when out of outrage or fear of looming disaster they come together to demand change? Should they focus on one or several issues? Should they form coalitions? What can and can’t be accomplished through electoral politics? How can movements operate democratically? What is effective leadership? 

Walzer addresses such questions with clarity, concision, wisdom, & wit in a book that everywhere insists not only on the centrality of movement politics to the health of democratic societies but on the deep satisfaction that is to be found there.

Political Action is both an indispensable resource for activists & a lasting & inspiring summons to arms.

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“The idea of republishing this book came from some high school students in L.A. They were part of a social justice group at their school, & most of the projects they were contemplating involved organizing of some kind. To help them think about that, their faculty adviser, Mickey Morgan...photocopied parts of Political Action & handed it out. "This is really good!" they told him. "This is what we need." What the kids said next became the impetus for this new edition: "Why is there nothing like this?”— from the new intro by Jon Wiener

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Michael Walzer is a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He served as the co-editor of the political journal Dissent for more than 3 decades & has written about a wide variety of topics in political theory & moral philosophy. His most recent book is A Foreign Policy for the Left.