AT LEAST SINCE the Enlightenment,when conventional notions of morality were stood on their heads, the intellectual class has found itself in diligent pursuit of its own elusive Holy Grail: a universal and rational order created, a la Descartes, from nothing. Wherever these folks have managed to put one of their abstractions into practice, of course, the result has been a drastic increase in some form of misery, from the terror of Revolutionary France to the camps of Nazi Germany to the Soviet-inspired Gulags that dot the world today. Yet despite these notorious failures, the idea that only the uncommitted and completely detached outsider can offer a valid moral critique of society has somehow triumphed.

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New century, same crisis: Walter Rauschenbusch & the social gospel It's time someone came along todispute this notion, and now someone has. In Interpretation and Social Criticism, Michael Walzer, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, brings his characteristic blend of horse sense and historical perspective to bear on the issue. "Social criticism,' he says, "is less the practical offspring of scientific knowledge than the educated cousin of common complaint.' It is essentially communal by nature, and thus the best critic is one who "is not an enemy,' one who despite his indictments "want[s] things to go well.'

At the outset, Walzer distinguishesbetween "three paths' of moral criticism: discovery, invention, and interpretation. Roughly, these correspond to religious revelation, philosophical creation, and social adaptation, and Walzer suggests that it is in the give-and-take of the last category that the social critic is most effective. What the social critic has to offer is, as he calls it, "the wisdom of the owl': accepting the given moral framework though possibly--indeed usually --"fiercely opposed to this or that prevailing practice or institutional arrangement.'

The chief objection lodged againstthis view of criticism is that the socially "connected' critic might not have the distance or perspective necessary for genuine criticism; he might, in other words, be too wed to the status quo, out of his own self-interest. This is exactly the charge leveled by "scientific' critics such as Marx, and it does have a certain undeniable validity, as witness the justifications for apartheid in South Africa and (ironically) for the class struggle in the most entrenched and self-interested order of our time, the Communist world.

Walzer has no problem with theidea that criticism requires perspective, denying only that the critic who steps back can ever "step back all the way to nowhere.' In sharp contrast to the "alienated' rebel of today's romantic lore, Walzer's paradigmatic critic is the Old Testament prophet. Walzer points out that the prophets' attachment to the Law and the teachings of Israel did not prevent them from uttering scathing indictments of the society about them. Indeed, their understood attachment to the society gave their message more force.

Walzer's particular favorite amongthese original social critics is Amos, the "first and possibly the most radical of Israel's literary prophets.' Like the others, Amos shuns the notion that he is offering anything new; instead, he is stung to criticism by the violation of the existing law. It is the hypocrisy that enrages, the great divide between what is publicly proclaimed and what is privately practiced. His job is to expose the short-comings in the latter and thus bring the two more into line, and in so doing he follows the critical pattern: He "begins with revulsion and ends with affirmation'--revulsion at the hypocrisy, yet affirmation of the core values.

Although Walzer dismisses both religiousdiscovery and philosophical speculation as models, he is much harder on the latter than on the former. ""Don't be indifferent' is not at all the same thing as "Love thy neighbor as thyself,'' he notes. Even when philosophical constructs are not mealy-mouthed, as in utilitarianism, their inventors tend to "fiddle with the felicific calculus so that it yields results closer to what we all think.' The long and short of it is that critics have to begin somewhere, and Walzer suggests that, rather than go through all these contortions, we might as well begin with what we have.

For the most part, Walzer's argumentsare cogent and wise; but, at 96 pages, cogency is more vice than virtue, an intellectual Chinese meal that leaves the reader hungry for more. True, he says he hopes this will ultimately prove the introduction for a larger volume; if so, he probably ought to have waited. However refreshing his argument here, it exhibits none of the extensive practical examples that characterized his Just and Unjust Wars, nor any of the profound social exegesis of his Exodus and Revolution.

A real judgment, therefore,must await delivery of the promised larger work. In the meantime, we are left with this tantalizing morsel. As Walzer points out, the assumption of criticism today is that some rational trump card will settle the debate once and for all. His own aim is far more modest: to provide the common reference points that allow a debate to get going in the first place.