In this essay I attempt to examine critically Michael Walzer's just war theory. I begin by pointing out what I take to be philosophically sound about his conception; in particular, his philosophical commitment to a doctrine of human rights as being morally decisive for questions of war. He argues, and I think correctly, that questions of justified wars and justified means within wars are ultimately questions about whether or not human rights are being respected. Unfortunately, Walzer does not always formulate his war principles in light of his fundamental commitment to human rights, and where he fails to do so, supreme emergencies and nuclear deterrence, I argue that his account becomes incoherent. At bottom, Walzer supposes, in these instances, that while individual rights may not be overriden for purely utilitarian reasons, rights may, nevertheless, be overridden for the sake of the political community. What this amounts to, for Walzer, is the following claim: that it is more just to secure the rights of a collection of individuals than it is to secure the rights of one individual. If so, it is morally permissible to suspend some individual rights for the sake of many individual rights. And even though I will hold that this argument is very persuasive, I will suggest that it is mistaken from a moral point of view which takes human rights to be morally conclusive.

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La signification de l’œuvre de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, philosophe et historien espagnol du XVIè siècle ne fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’aucun consensus : s’agit-il d’un scolastique attardé au siècle de la Renaissance, d’un précurseur du catholicisme post tridentin, d’un crypto-luthérien, ou de l’un des grands humanistes de son temps ? Quelle est la portée exacte des thèses qu’il formula en 1550-1551 à Valladolid pour défendre la légitimité des guerres espagnoles dans le Nouveau Monde ? Après avoir suivi pas à pas la formation intellectuelle du philosophe, les débats auxquels il prit part (contre Erasme, Luther, ou Las Casas) et analysé son œuvre d’historien, notre recherche fait apparaître l’orientation profondément rationaliste et universaliste de sa démarche. Elle met en lumière l’importance, pour la pensée politique occidentale, de la définition qu’il donne de la barbarie. Dépourvue de toute connotation inégalitaire fondée sur la race ou la religion, cette définition, politique et morale, décrit la barbarie comme résultant d’institutions publiques attentatoires à la loi naturelle. Elle affirme le pouvoir critique de la Raison humaine à l’égard des institutions et des pouvoirs, dans le Nouveau Monde comme dans l’Ancien. / There is currently no consensus as to the significance of the work of sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher and historian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda: was he an anachronistic scholastic in the century of the Renaissance, a precursor of post-Tridentine Catholicism, a crypto-Lutheran, or one of the great humanists of his time? What is the actual import of the arguments he put forward in Valladolid in 1550–1551 in defending the legitimacy of Spain's conquests in the New World? Founded on step-by-step examination of his intellectual training and the debateshe took part in (against Erasmus, Luther and Las Casas), and on close study of his work as a historian, my research reveals the deeply rationalist and universalist tendency of his approach and sheds fresh light on the importance, for Western political thinking, of his definition of barbarism. Devoid of all inegalitarian connotations based on race and religion, this political and moral definition describes barbarism as produced by public institutions detrimental to naturallaw, and asserts the critical power of human Reason with respect to institutions and constituted authority in the New World as in the Old.